Beginner's mind

Last September, I started learning Japanese through Duolingo.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Grantuking from Cerrione, Italy, Flag of Japan (1), CC BY 2.0]

My master's degree is in historical linguistics, so I'm at least a little better than the average bear when it comes to languages, but still -- my graduate research focused entirely on Indo-European languages.  (More specifically, the effects of the Viking invasions on Old English and the Celtic languages.)  Besides the Scandinavian languages and the ones found in the British Isles, I have a decent, if rudimentary, grounding in Greek and Latin, but still -- until last September, anything off of the Indo-European family tree was pretty well outside my wheelhouse.

The result is that there are features of Japanese that I'm struggling with, because they're so different from any other language I've studied.  Languages like Old English, Old Norse, Gaelic, Greek, and Latin are all inflected languages -- nouns change form depending on how they're being used in a sentence.  A simple example from Latin: in the two sentences "Canis felem momordit" ("The dog bit the cat") and "Felis canem momordit" ("The cat bit the dog"), you know who bit whom not by the order of the words, but by the endings.  The biter ends in -s, the bitee ends in -m.  The sentence would still be intelligible (albeit a little strange-sounding) if you rearranged the words.

Not so in Japanese.  In Japanese, not only does everything have to be in exactly the right order, just about every noun has to be followed by the correct particle, a short, more-or-less untranslatable word that tells you what the function of the previous word is.  They act a little like case endings do in inflected languages, and a little like prepositions in English, but with some subtleties that are different from either.  For example, here's a sentence in Japanese:

Tanaka san wa, sono sushiya de hirugohan o tabemashou ka?

Mr. Tanaka [particle indicating respect, always used when addressing another person] [particle indicating who you're talking to or the subject of the sentence], that sushi shop [particle indicating going to a place] lunch [particle indicating the object of the sentence] should we eat [particle indicating that what you just said was a question]? = "Mr. Tanaka, would you like to eat lunch at that sushi shop?"

Woe betide if you forget the particle or use the wrong one, or put things out of order.  Damn near every time I miss something on Duolingo and get that awful "clunk" noise that tells you that you screwed up, it's because I made a particle-related mistake.

And don't even get me started about the three different writing systems you have to learn.

This is the first time in a while I've been in the position of starting from absolute ground zero with something.  I guess I do have a bit of a leg up from having a background in other languages, but it's not really that much.  Being a rank beginner is humbling -- if you're going to get anywhere, you have to be willing to let yourself make stupid mistakes (sometimes over and over and over), laugh about it, and keep going.  I'm not really so good at that -- not only do I take myself way too damn seriously most of the time, I have that unpleasant combination of being (1) ridiculously self-critical and (2) highly competitive.  If you're familiar with Duolingo, you undoubtedly know about the whole XP (experience points) and "leagues" thing -- when you complete a lesson you earn XP (as long as you don't lose points in the lesson because you fucked up the particles again), and at the end of the week, you are ranked in XP against other learners, and depending on your score, you can move up into a new "league."

Or get "demoted."  Heaven forbid.  Given my personality, my attitude is "death before demotion."  As my wife pointed out, nothing happens if I get demoted -- it's not like the app reaches into my cerebrum and deletes what I've learned, or anything.  

She's right of course, but still.

I'll be damned if I'm gonna let myself get demoted.

So last week I reached "Diamond League," which is the top-tier.  Yay me, right?  Only now, there's nowhere left to go.  But I have to keep hammering at it, because if I don't I'll get dropped back into Obsidian League, and screw that sideways.

On the other hand, I keep at it because I also want to learn Japanese, right?  Of course right.

In Zen Buddhism, there's a concept called shoshin (初心), usually translated as "beginner's mind."  It means approaching every endeavor as if you were just seeing it for the first time, with excitement, anticipation -- and no preconceived notions of how it should go.  This is a hard lesson for me, harder even than remembering kanji.  I've had to get used to taking it slowly, realizing that I'm not going to learn a difficult and unfamiliar language overnight, and to come at it from a standpoint of curiosity and enjoyment.

It's not a competition, however determined I am to stay in the "Diamond League."  The process and the knowledge and the achievement should be the point, not a focus on some arbitrary standard of where I think I should be.

And some day, I'd like to visit the lovely country of Japan, and (maybe?) be able to converse a little in their language.  

[Image licensed under the Creative CommonsKeihin Nike, Bunkyou Koishikawa Botanical Japanese Garden 1 (1), CC BY-SA 3.0]

When that day comes, I suspect if I can approach the whole thing with beginner's mind, I'll get a lot more out of the experience.  Until that time -- I could probably think of a few other aspects of my life that this principle could be applied to, as well.

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Twists and turns

One of the things I love the most about science is how one thing leads to another.

Someone notices something anomalous, and thinks to ask, "why?"  The answer to that question leads to more "whys" and "hows," and before long it's led you somewhere you never dreamed of, and opened up new vistas for understanding the universe.

Take, for example, the strange phenomenon of lunar swirls.

Swirls near Firsov Crater [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

Lunar swirls are pretty much what they sound like; undulating curls of light-colored rock and dust, often overlying craters and other topographic features, but seeming not to follow any obvious contour lines.  This is odder than it may appear to be at first.  We see lots of looping, curly stuff on Earth -- cirrus clouds, the twist of hurricanes and tornadoes, the meanders of rivers -- but all of those occur because of some fluid flowing, be it air or water vapor or liquid water.  The Moon has no atmosphere, and never has had flowing water; so what's causing the sinuous shape?

The mystery deepened when lunar sampling missions found out that the light regions had somehow been magnetized.  This at least explained the color difference; the magnetized bits deflected the particles in the solar wind, causing them to hit nearby rocks instead.  This triggered a series of chemical reactions that darkened the rocks' surfaces, while the magnetized parts were spared and stayed light-colored.

But then the question was, how did the light-colored rocks get magnetized in the first place?

It happens easily enough on Earth; a lot of terrestrial rocks have particles of magnetite (iron II, III oxide), and while they're in the molten state the particles are free to move.  They respond like compass needles, aligning with the Earth's magnetic field, and when the lava cools the magnetite crystals are frozen in place, locking in a magnetic signature.  (You probably know that this property is how geologists found out that the Earth's magnetic field periodically flips -- something that was key to proving the plate tectonics model.)

The problem is twofold.  First, magnetite is rare in lunar rocks; and even more difficult to explain -- the Moon has no magnetic field.  So what are these magnetic crystals, and how are they aligning well enough to make the rocks magnetized?

A possible answer was the subject of a paper this week in the Journal of Geophysical Research, describing a study out of Washington University.  A rock called ilmenite, common on the Moon's surface, can form crystalline iron (which is highly magnetic).  As far as how the crystals got aligned, the research team found a process that could cause enough of a magnetic field anomaly to cause it -- if there was a flow of high-titanium magma underground.

"Our analog experiments showed that at lunar conditions, we could create the magnetizable material that we needed," said study co-author Michael Krawczynski. "So, it's plausible that these swirls are caused by subsurface magma...  If you're going to make magnetic anomalies by the methods that we describe, then the underground magma needs to have high titanium.  We have seen hints of this reaction creating iron metal in lunar meteorites and in lunar samples from Apollo.  But all of those samples are surface lava flows, and our study shows cooling underground should significantly enhance these metal-forming reactions."

So a formation on the lunar surface led to an inference about magnetism and the solar wind, and ultimately gave us information about the subsurface geology of the Moon.  I don't know about you, but I love this kind of stuff.  So many of us just look at things and shrug our shoulders, if we notice them at all.  And maybe that's what sets scientists apart; their capacity for seeing what the rest of us miss, and most importantly, wondering why things are the way they are.

It's pretty clear that science isn't just a list of vocabulary -- even though sadly, it's often taught that way.  Science is a verb.  As the brilliant polymath Jules Henri Poincaré put it, "Science is built up with facts as a house is with stones; but a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house."

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The fork in the road

One of the most bizarre (and misunderstood) features of quantum physics is indeterminacy.

This is because we live in a macroscopic universe that -- most of the time, at least -- behaves in a determinate fashion.  Now, that doesn't mean we necessarily know everything about it.  For example, if we drop balls into a Galton board -- a device with a grid of pegs to deflect the ball's path -- eventually we'll get a normal distribution:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Matemateca (IME USP), Galton box, CC BY-SA 4.0]

With a device like a Galton board, we can accurately predict the probability of any given ball landing in a particular slot, but the actual path of the ball can't be predicted ahead of time.

Here's where the difficulty starts, though.  When people talk about quantum phenomena and describe them as probabilities, there's a way in which the analogy to macroscopic probability breaks down.  With a Galton board, the problem with predicting a ball's path doesn't mean it's not completely deterministic; it has to do with our (very) incomplete knowledge about the ball's initial state.  If you knew every last detail about the game -- each ball's mass, spin, air resistance, elasticity, the angle and speed of release, the angle at which it strikes the first peg, as well as the position, shape, and composition of every peg -- at least in theory, you could predict with one hundred percent accuracy which slot it would land in.  The ball's path is completely controlled by deterministic Newtonian physics; it's only the complexity of the system and our lack of knowledge that makes it impossible to parse.

This is not the situation with quantum systems.

When a particle travels from its source to a detector -- such as in the famous double-slit experiment -- it's not that the particle really and truly went through either slit A or slit B, and we simply don't happen to know which.  The particle, or more accurately, the wave function of the particle, took both paths at the same time, and how the detector is set up determines what we end up seeing.  Prior to being observed at the detector, the particle literally existed in all possible paths simultaneously, including ones passing through Bolivia and the Andromeda Galaxy.

To summarize the difference -- in a determinate system, we may not be able to predict an outcome, but that's only because we have incomplete information about it.  In an indeterminate system, the probability field itself is the reality.  However tempting it is to say that a particle, prior to being observed, took a specific fork in the road, and we just don't know which, completely misses the truth -- and misses how utterly bizarre the quantum world actually is.

People who object to this admittedly weird model of the world usually fall back on a single question, which is surprisingly hard to answer.  Okay, so on the one hand we have deterministic but complex systems, whose outcome is sensitively dependent on initial conditions (like the Galton board).  On the other, we have quantum systems which are probabilistic by nature.  How could we tell the difference?  Maybe in a quantum system there are hidden variables -- information about the system we don't have access to -- that make it appear indeterminate.  (This was Einstein's opinion, which he summed up in his famous statement that "God does not play dice with the universe.")

Unfortunately for Einstein, and for anyone else who is uncomfortable with the fact that the microscopic basis of reality is fundamentally at odds with our desire for a mechanistic, predictable universe, research at the Vienna University of Technology, which was described in a paper this week in Physical Review Letters, has shown conclusively that there are no hidden variables.  Our reality is indeterminate.  The idea of particles having definite positions and velocities, independent of observation and measurement, is simply wrong.

The experiment hinges on something called the Leggett-Garg Inequality -- described in a 1985 paper by physicists Anthony James Leggett and Anupam Garg -- which clearly distinguishes between how classical (determinate) and quantum (indeterminate) systems evolve over time.  Correlations between three different time measurements of the same system would show a different magnitude depending on whether it was behaving in a classical or quantum fashion.

The problem is, no one was able to figure out how to create a real-world test of it -- until now.  The team developed a neutron interferometer, which splits a neutron beam into two parts and then recombines it at a detector.  And the results of the experiment showed conclusively that contrary to our mental image of neutrons as hard little b-bs, that of course have to take either the left or the right hand path, every single neutron took both paths at the same time.  This violates the Leggett-Garg Inequality and is a crystal-clear hallmark of an inherently indeterminate system.

"Our experiment shows that nature really is as strange as quantum theory claims," said study co-author Stephan Sponar.  "No matter which classical, macroscopically realistic theory you come up with, it will never be able to explain reality.  It doesn't work without quantum physics."

Now, mind you, I'm not saying I completely understand this.  As Richard Feynman himself put it, "I think we can safely say that no one understands quantum physics."  (And if the great Feynman could say this, it doesn't leave much room for a rank amateur like me to pontificate about it.)  But perhaps the most fitting way to end is with a quote by the brilliant biologist J. B. S. Haldane: "The world is not only queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose."

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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