Hype detector

There's a problem with online science directed at laypeople.

I was discussing this with a friend yesterday.  Although he and I both have a decent science background, we're both very much generalists by nature.  We're interested in many different topics, we're each kinda sorta vaguely good at maybe a dozen of them, but we're actual experts in none.  It's not that I think this is an inherently bad thing; having a broad knowledge base is part of why I was a good high school teacher.  I did a decent job teaching biology, but could still field the occasional pop fly into deep right about, say, the ancient history of Norway.

The issue centers around the fact that curious people like myself are attracted to what we don't know, so when we see something unusual and attention-grabbing, we want to click on it.  Couple this tendency with a second issue -- that when sites like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram are monetized, it's based on the number of clicks (or the minutes watched) -- and you have what amounts to an attractive nuisance.

There are some sites that do their level best to present science as accurately and fairly as possible; two excellent examples are Neil deGrasse Tyson's YouTube channel StarTalk and astrophysicist Becky Smethurst's outstanding channel Dr. Becky.  (If you're interested in astronomy, you should subscribe to both of these immediately.)  But intermingled with those are hundreds of others that mix a smidgen of science with a heaping handful of sensationalized hype, designed to get you to say "WTF?" and click the link -- because that's how they get revenue.

I'm not going to give you any links -- they don't deserve it -- but a quick perusal of my "Recommended For You" YouTube videos this morning included the following:

• One claiming that Betelgeuse is ABOUT TO GO SUPERNOVA (capitalization theirs), with a caption of "Life on Earth Will Be Wiped Out?" and a photo of physicist Michio Kaku looking worried.
• "If You See the Sky Turn This Color, Run!" -- turns out it's the "green sky = tornado" thing, and when you strip away all the excess verbiage it boils down to the rather well-known fact that tornadoes are scary and you should avoid being in the middle of one.
• "99% of Humans Die -- Could It Happen Again?"  This one is about the Toba Eruption, the effects of which are far from settled in scientific circles, and the answer to the question is "I guess so, but it's not likely any time soon."
• "Why an Impossible Paradox Inside Black Holes Appears to Break Physics!"  This is about the "information paradox," which is certainly curious, but it (1) obviously isn't impossible because it exists, (2) isn't about the inside of black holes because by definition we don't know what happens in there, and (3) hasn't "broken physics" (although it did demonstrate that our knowledge of black holes is incomplete, which is hardly surprising).
• "Yellowstone Volcano Simulation!" -- heavy on the catastrophizing and AI-generated footage of people being vaporized, light on the science.  As I've pointed out here at Skeptophilia, there is no sign that the Yellowstone Supervolcano is anywhere near an eruption.

And so on and so forth.

The trouble is, science videos and webpages exist on a spectrum, with wonderful sites like Veritasium on one end and outright lunacy like the subject of yesterday's post (about people who have allegedly jumped through time and space and ended up back in the Carboniferous Period) on the other.  It's usually pretty obvious when you find one that's straight-up science; the total wackos are also generally easy to spot.

It's the ones in the middle that are troublesome.  They mix in just enough science to give them the façade of reliability, but stir it into a ton of flashy, sensationalized speculation.  Since minutes watched = dollars earned, these videos generally draw out the message; they're often way longer than the topic warrants, and are characterized by endless repetition.  (I watched one twenty-minute video on Cretaceous dinosaurs that must have said eight times, "a fearsome predator unlike anything we currently have on Earth"!)

It's hard to know what to do about this.  Even people who are intellectually curious and want to learn actual science like to be entertained; and there's nothing wrong with framing scientific content in a way that's engaging to the audience, something that the three outstanding sites I mentioned certainly do.  But the monetized social media model feeds into the practice of using science as clickbait, and therefore encourages content creators to exaggerate (or outright fabricate) the story to make it seem more exciting or edgy or dangerous than it actually is, with the result that people come away less well-informed than they went in.

Which is frustrating, but isn't going to change any time soon.  And I guess this sort of sensationalized garbage is nothing new; all that's changed is the delivery mode.  Growing up, every time I went through a grocery store checkout line I was assaulted by The Weekly World News, which featured headlines about BatBoy and the Lost Continent of Atlantis and Elvis Is Still Alive And Was Spotted In Tokyo, and I came away mostly unscathed.

So the important thing is teaching people how to tease apart the good science from the hype.  But honestly, it always has been.

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The forest primeval

New from the "I Thought I'd Heard Everything" department, we have: a warning that you should look out for a specific kind of tree, because if you see one, you have slipped through a portal in space-time.

The tree is a Lepidodendron, and the good thing about it is at least it's pretty distinctive-looking:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Tim Bertelink, Lepidodendron, CC BY-SA 4.0]

So it's unlikely you'd mistake it for anything else.  Here's one account (of many) that have shown up all over social media, especially Reddit and TikTok:

I was on a hike in central Pennsylvania with some friends, and went off from the others to explore.  I grew up not far from there and know the area pretty well, but after about a half-hour things started looking weird.  The area is kind of rocky and hilly, but the path I was on kept heading down, and soon I was in a swampy terrain I'd never seen before.  I spent a lot of time outdoors as a kid and I know the kind of trees that grow there, and I'd never seen ones like this.  Tall and skinny, kind of like a stretched-out pine tree, but the bark was weird, with a pattern like the scales of a fish.  There were other plants, too, but I didn't recognize a single one.  Something about the place "felt wrong," like I'd stumbled into somewhere I wasn't supposed to be.  By this time I was completely freaked out.  I tried to retrace my steps, but the undergrowth was really thick with these strange-looking plants of all kinds.  Eventually I found my way to drier ground, and pretty soon found the path again.  Now all around me I saw maples and oaks and hickories, just ordinary trees, and the weird out-of-place feeling disappeared.  After another fifteen minutes of walking I found my friends again, and everything turned out okay, but to this day I can't let go of the feeling that I had a narrow escape from being lost forever.

The guy said he looked for pics online of "weird skinny trees like pine trees" and eventually found one that was an exact match to what he'd seen.

You guessed it.  The Lepidodendron.

The problem with all this is that the Lepidodendron has been extinct for over 250 million years.

They had their heyday in the Carboniferous Period, and in fact are only (very) distantly related to pines; the extant plants most closely related to the Lepidodendron are club mosses, most commonly found in the understory of deep, undisturbed forests.  And at least the unnamed storyteller got the place and climate right; a lot of rocks in Pennsylvania are of Carboniferous age, and it was in general a hot, humid, rainy period of Earth's history.

The thing is, though, if the people who say they've seen Lepidodendrons actually have wandered through a fold in the space-time continuum and found themselves back in the Carboniferous Period, it wouldn't be apparent only because they'd see strange scaly trees and be calf-deep in mud.  If you were suddenly transported to the mid-Carboniferous, (1) it would be absolutely unambiguous, and (2) you'd be damn lucky to last fifteen minutes.  The temperatures were an average of ten degrees Celsius warmer than they are today, with oxygen levels at around 30% (as compared to today's 21%).  The higher oxygen favored the evolution toward larger size in animals that are limited by the efficiency of their respiratory system -- most notably arthropods.  In those same swamps where you'd find Lepidodendron trees, you'd find the dragonfly Meganeura, with a 75-centimeter wingspan; the 2.6-meter-long millipede Arthropleura; and the 70-centimeter-long scorpion Pulmonoscorpius.  If that's not bad enough, you'd have to avoid being eaten by the three-meter-long, sixty-kilogram predatory reptile Sphenacodon, which came equipped with a long row of big, nasty, pointy teeth.

Sphenacodon ferox skull in the Field Museum of Chicago [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Smokeybjb, Sphenacodon ferox 1, CC BY-SA 3.0]

So as interesting as it is, the Carboniferous Period is not a place you'd want to go in your time machine.

Anyhow, I got curious about why all of a sudden people are seeing an obscure genus of extinct trees in downtown Harrisburg or wherever, so I did some digging.  After wading through a bunch of accounts of the "YES I SAW ONE OMG I WAS IN ANOTHER DIMENSION AND IT WAS SOOOO SCARY" type, I found out that the whole thing started three years ago when someone posted the following on Reddit:

You should know two things about this, though; (1) the person who posted this originally is an actual paleontologist, and (2) for fuck's sake, he meant it as a joke.  It didn't get much traction beyond a few har-de-hars from people who were fossil enthusiasts until fall of last year, when a TikToker with the handle @jese2063 posted images of spooky trees that look vaguely like Lepidodendrons, with an equally creepy-sounding soundtrack and scary text about how if you see one, you've gone back in time and are in horrific danger.  (It's hard to tell whether he believed it himself; my sense is not, but I have an unfortunate habit of giving people the benefit of the doubt when they don't deserve it.)

In any case, that opened the floodgates.  @jese2063's video got over 4.5 million views, and now there are hundreds of similar claims, many of them from people like the Pennsylvanian hiker who said they'd actually visited the Carboniferous Period and lived to tell the tale.

The problem is, like with @jese2063, it's difficult to discern how many of these are true believers, and how many are simply adding their contributions to a growing Carboniferous creepypasta.  I have nothing against scary fiction -- after all, I've written my fair share of it -- but you have to wonder if some of these people are deadly serious.

I mean, the benefit of the doubt only goes so far.

In any case, that's the latest frightening thing to look out for.  If you're ever in, say, Scotland, and suddenly you find yourself in a hot fern-filled rainforest, now you'll be prepared.  Can't honestly tell you what to do about it, however.  Just enjoy looking around for fifteen minutes until you're eaten by a Sphenacodon or attacked by enormous millipedes, I guess.

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Quantum foams and tiny wormholes

One of the most frustrating things for insatiably curious laypeople like myself is to find that despite our deep and abiding interest in a topic, there's simply a limit to what we're capable of understanding.

I know that happened to me with mathematics.  All through grade school, and even into college, I found math to be one of my easiest subjects.  I never had to struggle to understand it, and got high grades without honestly trying all that hard.

Then I hit Calculus 3.

I use the word "hit" deliberately, because it felt like running into a brick wall.  I think the problem was that this was the point where I stopped being able to visualize what was going on, and without that concrete sense of why things worked the way they did, it turned into memorization and application of a set of what appeared to be randomly-applied rules, a technique that only worked when I remembered them accurately.  I lost the intuitiveness of my earlier experience.  It returned to some extent when I took Differential Equations (partly due to a stupendous teacher), but I went from there to Vector Calculus, and it was all over.

That was the moment I decided that I am a Bear Of Very Little Brain, and the effect of the experience (combined with a similar unfortunate roadblock in Classical Mechanics) convinced me that a career as a physicist was not in the cards.

That feeling came back to me full-force when I ran across a paper in the journal Physical Review D entitled "Dark Energy from Topology Change Induced by Microscopic Gauss-Bonnet Wormholes," by Stylianos A. Tsilioukas, Emmanuel N. Saridakis, and Charalampos Tzerefos, of the University of Thessaly.  Even reading the abstract left me with an expression rather like the one my puppy has when I try to explain a concept to him that is simply beyond his comprehension, like why he shouldn't eat my gym socks.  You can tell he's trying to understand, he clearly wants to understand, but it's just not getting through.

But as far as the paper goes, at least I can tell that the idea is really cool, so I'm going to attempt to tell you about it.  If there are any physics boffins in the studio audience who want to correct my misapprehensions or misstatements, please feel free to let me know in the comments.

About seventy percent of the mass/energy content of the universe is something called dark energy.  (It's entirely unrelated to dark matter; the potential confusion between the two has led to a push to rename it vacuum energy.)  Dark energy is a bit of a placeholder name anyhow, given that we don't really know what it is; all we see is its effect, which is the measured increasing expansion rate of the universe.

The current best guess about its nature is that dark energy is a property of space itself (i.e., not something that space contains, but an inherent characteristic of the fabric of spacetime).  This energy manifests as a repulsive force, but because it's intrinsic, it doesn't dilute as space expands, the way a cloud might dissipate into air; its content per unit volume remains constant, so as space expands, the total amount of dark energy in the universe increases, resulting in a steady acceleration of the expansion rate.  At the moment, at least on the local level, gravity is still stronger than the expansion, so we're safe enough; but eventually (we're talking a long way in the future) space will have expanded so much that dark energy will overwhelm all other forces, and matter itself will be torn to shreds.

But despite this, we still have no idea what causes it, or even what it really is.

The Tsilioukas et al. paper -- once again, as far as I can understand it -- proposes a solution to that.

On the smallest scales, spacetime seems to be a "quantum foam" -- a roiling, bubbling ferment of virtual particles and antiparticles, constantly being created and destroyed.  That these virtual particles are real has been demonstrated experimentally, despite their existing for such a short time that most physicists would question even using the word "existing" as a descriptor.  So these incredibly quick fluctuations in spacetime -- even in a complete vacuum -- can have a discernible effect despite the fact that detecting the particles themselves is theoretically impossible.

What Tsilikouas et al. suggest is that there's a feature of the quantum foam that, described mathematically, is basically a network of tiny wormholes -- tunnels through spacetime connecting two separate points.  They're (1) as quick to appear and vanish as the aforementioned virtual particles, and (2) extremely submicroscopic, so don't get your hopes up about visiting Deep Space Nine any time soon.

The mathematics of these wormholes is described by a principle from topology called the Gauss-Bonnet theorem, named after mathematicians Carl Friederich Gauss and Pierre Ossian Bonnet (no relation), and when you include a Gauss-Bonnet term in the equations of General Relativity, you get something that seems to act just like the observed effects of dark energy.

So the runaway expansion of the universe might be due to tiny wormholes forming from the quantum foam of the vacuum -- and those minuscule fluctuations in spacetime add up to seventy percent of the total mass/energy content of the universe.

Like I said, it's not like I'm any more qualified to analyze whether they're on to something than Jethro is to explain why chewing up my gym socks makes him a Very Bad Puppy.  And it must be said that these theoretical models sometimes run into the sad truth from Thomas Henry Huxley, that "the great tragedy of science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact."

But given that up till now, dark energy has been nothing more than a mysterious, undetectable, unanalyzable something that nevertheless outweighs all other kinds of matter and energy put together -- a rather embarrassing situation for physicists to find themselves in -- the new explanation seems to be a significant step in the right direction.

At least to a Bear Of Very Little Brain.

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Acid test

Apparently the most popular fad in alt-med nutrition these days is the so-called "alkaline diet."

The idea here is that lots of diseases -- cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis, and Alzheimer's are the four most commonly mentioned -- are caused by your body having an "acid pH."  All you have to do, they say, is alter your diet to foods that result in "alkaline ash" (residues with a pH above 7) and you'll be healthy and happy and disease free.  (Here's one example.)

As is the case with most of these sorts of claims, it has a kernel of truth.  There are foods that result in alkaline ash; others that have acidic ash; and some that have neutral (pH = about 7) ash.  The easiest way to monitor this is to test your urine pH, as your kidneys regulate your blood pH by excreting or retaining hydrogen ions, which is what pH is measuring in any case.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Further, a lot of the alkaline ash foods -- fruits and nuts especially -- are certainly part of a healthy diet, and some of the acidic ash foods -- meat, poultry, fish, dairy, grains and alcohol -- are problematic if they make up too great a percentage of your diet.

But that's where the realistic bit ends, and the pseudoscience takes over.

The fact is, you can't change your body's pH, for the very good reason that it's one of the most tightly-regulated homeostatic factors in your body.  If you're in good health, your blood pH is always 7.4.  If it varies more than 0.1 pH points either direction, you are in a world of hurt.  Here's a quick summary of what happens if your blood becomes more acidic:

pH = 7.4 -- happy and healthy
pH = 7.3 -- blood acidosis; symptoms are shortness of breath, headache, confusion
pH = 7.2 -- dead

And the same for moving in the alkaline direction:

pH = 7.4 -- happy and healthy
pH = 7.5 -- blood alkalosis; symptoms are nausea, muscle spasms, twitching, numbness
pH = 7.6 -- dead

So the idea that by eliminating meat from your diet, you'll become more alkaline, and that's somehow a good thing, is idiotic.  Each tissue in your body has a particular pH at which it functions best -- some are acidic (e.g. the stomach), some are alkaline (e.g. the blood and the small intestine), and (more importantly) changing that pH in any of them would be a seriously bad idea.

The bottom line is that if our pH yo-yoed around every time we ate a cheeseburger or an apple, we'd be dead.  End of story.

Now, it's true that your urine pH varies a lot; that's because your kidneys are regulating your blood pH by excreting whatever it takes to keep your blood in homeostasis.  So of course your urine pH changes.  It's compensating for what you eat and drink.  But there's nothing healthier about having alkaline urine.  All it means is that your kidneys are working, which is the same thing that having acidic urine means.

The funny thing is, the "alkaline diet" site I linked above gives a nod to that idea in the following paragraph: 

Even very tiny alterations in the pH level of various organisms can cause major problems.  For example, due to environmental concerns, such as increasing CO2 deposition, the pH of the ocean has dropped from 8.2 to 8.1 and various life forms living in the ocean have greatly suffered.  The pH level is also crucial for growing plants, and therefore it greatly affects the mineral content of the foods we eat.  Minerals in the ocean, soil and human body are used as buffers to maintain optimal pH levels, so when acidity rises, minerals fall.

Right.  So that's why we have kidneys.  So that kind of shift in pH and other electrolytes doesn't kill us.

You'd think that a quick perusal of sites regarding actual research on the effects of diet (here's a good example) would immediately settle that point, but unfortunately the availability of correct information hasn't stopped the claims.  And worse, there are people now selling all sorts of supplements that are supposed to regulate our pH, and without which dire things are predicted to happen.

Me, I'm fond of the dietary advice "everything in moderation."  Listen to your body, eat a good balance of nutrients, get plenty of exercise, stay hydrated, don't spend your money on useless supplements, and don't go crazy overboard on something like the amazing grapefruit-and-peanut-butter diet.  (I don't know if that actually exists, but given some of the bizarre diets out there, I'll bet it does.)

Best of all, learn a little bit of biology.  It's cool, it's interesting, and it'll keep you from getting suckered by alt-med nonsense.  And with that, I think I'm going to go have some bacon and eggs for breakfast, confident in the knowledge that my kidneys are up to the challenge.

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The problem with research

If there's one phrase that torques the absolute hell out of me -- and just about every actual scientist out there -- it's, "Well, I did my research."

Oh, you did, did you?  What lab did you do your research in?  Or was it field work?  Let's see your data!  Which peer-reviewed journal published your research?  How many times has it been cited in other scientific journals?

Part of the problem, of course, is like a lot of words in the English language -- "theory" and "proof" are two examples that come to mind -- the word "research" is used one way by actual researchers and a different way by most other people.  We were taught the alternate definition of "research" in grade school, with being assigned "research papers," which meant "go out and look up stuff other people have found out on the topic, and summarize that in your own words."  There's a value to doing this; it's a good starting place to understanding a subject, and is honestly where we all began with scholarship.

The problem is -- and it exists even at the grade-school level of inquiry -- this kind of "research" is only as good as the sources you choose.  When I was a teacher, one of the hardest things to get students to understand was that all sources are not created equal.  A paper in Science, or even the layperson's version of it in Scientific American or Discover, is head-and-shoulders above the meanderings of Some Random Guy in his blog.  (And yes, I'm well aware that this pronouncement is being made by Some Random Guy in his blog.)

That doesn't mean those less-reputable sources are necessarily wrong, of course.  It's more that they can't be relied upon.  While papers in Science (and other comparable journals) are occasionally retracted for errors or inaccuracies, there is a vetting process that makes their likelihood of being correct vastly higher.  After all, any oddball with a computer can create a website, and post whatever they want on it, be it brilliant posts about cutting-edge science or the looniest of wingnuttery.

The confusion between the two definitions of the word research has the effect of increasing people's confidence in the kind we were all doing in middle school, and giving that low-level snooping about an undeserved gloss of reputability.  This was the upshot of a paper in Nature (peer-reviewed science, that), by Kevin Aslett of the University of Central Florida et al., entitled, "Online Searches to Evaluate Misinformation Can Increase Its Perceived Veracity."  Their results are kind of terrifying, if not unexpected given the "post-truth society" we've somehow slid into.  The authors write:

Although conventional wisdom suggests that searching online when evaluating misinformation would reduce belief in it... across five experiments, we present consistent evidence that online search to evaluate the truthfulness of false news articles actually increases the probability of believing them...  We find that the search effect is concentrated among individuals for whom search engines return lower-quality information.  Our results indicate that those who search online to evaluate misinformation risk falling into data voids, or informational spaces in which there is corroborating evidence from low-quality sources. 

The tendency appears to be that when someone is "doing their research" on a controversial subject, what they do is an online search, pursued until they find two or three hits on sources that corroborate what they already believed, and that strengthens their conviction that they were right in the first place.  The study found that very little attention was usually given to the quality of those sources, or where those sources got the information themselves.  If it makes the "researcher" nod sagely and say, "Yeah, that's what I thought," it doesn't matter if the information came from NASA -- or from QAnon.

The problem is, a lot of those bogus sources can look convincing. 

Other times, of course, all you have to be able to do is add two-digit numbers to realize that they're full of shit.

People see data in some online source, and rarely consider (1) who collected the data and why, (2) how it was analyzed, (3) what information wasn't included in the analysis, and (4) whether it was verified, and if so how and by whom.  I first ran into the old joke about "73.4% of all statistics are made up on the spot" years ago, and it's still funny, even if our laughs are rather wry these days.  Sites like Natural News, Food Babe, Before It's News, Breitbart.com, Mercola.com, InfoWars, One America News, and even a few with scholarly-sounding names -- like The Society for Scientific Exploration, Evolution News, and The American College of Pediatricians are three examples -- are clearinghouses for fringe-y and discredited ideas, often backed up by data that's either cherry-picked and misrepresented, or from sources even further down the ladder of sketchy credibility.

Given how much bullshit is out there,  a lot of it well-hidden behind facts, figures, and fancy writing, it can be a challenge for laypeople (and I very much count myself amongst their numbers) to discern truth from fiction.  It's also an uphill struggle to fight against the very natural human tendency of confirmation bias; we all would love it if our cherished notions of how the world works were one hundred percent correct.  But if we want to make smart decisions, we all need to stop saying "I did my research" when all that "research" involved was a twenty-minute Google search to find the website of some random crank who confirmed what we already believed.

Remember, as the brilliant journalist Kathryn Schulz points out, that one of the most mind-expanding and liberating things we can say is, "I don't know.  Maybe I'm wrong."  And to start from that open-minded perspective and find out what the facts really are -- from the actual researchers.

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The fight continues

September is Bisexual Awareness Month, which ironically I only became aware of on September 1.

I guess I must have known that at some point, but given that my entire approach to life has been one long tug-of-war between "please notice me" and "OH NO SOMEONE JUST NOTICED ME," I'm not sure how comfortable I am adding to my own visibility.

Be that as it may, and notwithstanding how many days and months are set aside to commemorate ridiculous stuff (January 21 is National Squirrel Appreciation Day?  Really?), overall I think Bisexual Awareness Month is a good thing.  When I was a teenager and first figured out that I was equally attracted to men and women, I had no idea there was even a name for that, much less that it was normal and okay.  The fact that we're now able to talk about this stuff will -- I fervently hope -- save the current generation of shy, scared, confused fifteen-year-olds from going through the hell I endured.

However, in the past ten years we've seen a staggering upsurge in anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in the United States, and as we queer people and allies have become more vocal, the bigots have, too.  Just last week Baptist minister Dillon Awes, of Watauga, Texas, said that another minister -- Andrew Stanley -- should be shot in the head for allowing two gay men to deliver a sermon at his church.  The fact that there was a single person in the congregation willing to sit there and listen to his vicious diatribe shows that we are far from eradicating homophobia.

When Awes is screaming his ugly invective into an empty room, I'll be satisfied.

However, we're also far from done as far as legislation goes.  Anti-LGBTQ+ bills are like the Hydra -- defeat one of them, and nine more spring up in its place.  Here are a few current battles:

• Arizona -- House Bill 2657, which forces school employees to out queer children to their parents -- even if that would put the child in danger.  Parents, the bill says, have "inalienable rights" to know everything about their children, including information given to school employees in confidence.
• South Carolina -- Senate Bill 3728 -- places all authority over the teaching of "morals, ethics, and civic responsibility" into the hands of parents, allowing them carte blanche for prohibiting undefined "certain concepts" from being mentioned in the classroom.  It doesn't take much imagination to guess what "concepts" they're talking about.
• Delaware -- Senate Bill 191 -- defines sex and gender as binary (contrary to known biological science) and restricts athletes from competing on teams split by gender according to "sex as determined at or near birth."
• Oklahoma -- House Bill 3120 -- prohibits any mention in public schools of "sexual activity that deviates from a traditional family structure" and "non-heterosexual orientation."
• Florida -- Senate Bill 1382 -- allows employers to use whatever names and pronouns they see fit, irrespective of the employee's request.

And so on and so forth.

I have to state for the record that there's a discussion to be had about age-appropriateness of any educational material surrounding sexuality (and anything else, honestly).  That is not what this is about.  No one -- no one -- is recommending placing sexually-explicit or age-inappropriate material of any kind into public school classrooms.  The characterization of legislation like South Carolina SB 3728 as "protect the children" is a smokescreen, designed to deflect criticism and re-marginalize queer people, returning us to the closeted, terrified environment I grew up in back in southern Louisiana in the 1970s.  If you doubt this, ask yourself seriously how long it would take for Oklahoma HB 3120 to be used to prevent a gay teacher from being out publicly.  Is having a photograph of him and his husband on his desk "promoting sexual activity that deviates from traditional family structure"?

Yes, we queer people have much to be thankful for.  We've come a very long way.  Had the general tolerance and acceptance we have now been present when I was a teenager, my life would have had a very different trajectory.  And if you look at the list of current and proposed anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, it's heartening how many of them are labeled "defeated."  Just the fact that I can post Bi Awareness Month stuff on my social media, and have nothing but positive responses, is encouraging.

But the fight isn't over.  

So buckle up, friends and allies.  We still have work to do.

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An anodyne against despair

Yesterday, I was discussing with a friend how important it is to find things that lift your spirit. The world has been replete with dismal news lately, and it's all too easy to decide that everything's hopeless -- to become either cynical or despondent.  I know I have to fight that tendency myself, especially considering the topics I frequently address here at Skeptophilia.

It's essential to take a moment, every so often, to step back and recognize that however terrible current events have been, there is still great love, compassion, and wonder in the world.  So I thought I'd take a day off from the continual stream of WTF that the news has become, and consider a few examples of what beauty we humans are capable of.  Think of it as an anodyne against despair, a way to inoculate yourself against losing hope.

Dalai Lama Mandala I, pen/ink/watercolor, by Carol Bloomgarden [Image used with permission]

First, take a look at this video by the Dutch artist Thijme Termaat. He spent two and a half years creating a progressive set of paintings, condensed it into a three-minute video, set it to a piece from Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, and named it Timelapse. Take three minutes and be amazed.

When I was in Boston a while back, I went to the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, and I lucked out and saw some work by the incredibly creative Rachel Perry Welty. The piece that absolutely captivated me was a twelve-minute video called Karaoke Wrong Number, wherein she took four years' worth of voicemail messages she'd received by accident (i.e., the person had called her number but thought they were leaving a message to someone else entirely), and lip synced to them.  I stood there and watched the entire piece three times in a row -- it's mesmerizing.  The incredible thing about it is that she's able to shift her facial expression and body language to match the voice and message of the person -- it's funny, wry, and at times absolutely uncanny, and illustrates Welty's sheer creative genius.  (You can watch a five-minute clip from it at the link above.)

If you don't mind crying, take a look at Kseniya Simonova's stupendous feat of drawing in sand on a light box that brought the whole audience to tears in Ukraine's Got Talent.  It shows the effect of the German invasion on the people of Ukraine during World War II, and packs an emotional punch like nothing I've ever seen before -- especially considering what's happening in Ukraine right now.  It's a perfect example of an artist's ability to distill pain into beauty.

If after that, you want to see something that is pure whimsy to cheer you up, you need to watch the amazing musical marble machine created by Martin Molin of the Swedish band Wintergatan.  Molin created a wild Rube Goldberg machine, powered by a hand crank and 2,000 marbles, that plays a tune he wrote. It's one of those things that you watch, and you just can't quite believe it's real.

If you want to blow your mind further, have a look at this short little video showing one of the crazy three-dimensional sculptures of Japanese mathematician and artist Kokichi Sugihara.  Sugihara specializes in creating optical illusions out of paper -- in this case, a structure that seems to induce marbles to roll uphill.  The weird thing to me is that even when he shows you how it's done -- which he does, about halfway through -- you still can't see it any other way.  It's so cleverly done that our brains simply can't handle it.

Last, for sheer exuberance -- if you're like me, it'll make you laugh and cry at the same time -- check out the short film "Where in the Hell Is Matt?", made by Matt Harding.  Harding set out to film himself dancing in as many different spots on Earth as he could get to, often joined by children, adults, and dogs, all simply expressing how wonderful it is to be alive.  It's set to the heart-wrenchingly gorgeous song "Praan" by Garry Schyman.  The music and the spirit of Harding's project could not blend together more perfectly.

So there you are.  Even when things are bad, people are still creating beautiful, funny, and whimsical things.  They still care about bringing joy into the world, despite the constant barrage of pain, discouragement, and bad news we're subjected to on a daily basis.  I don't know about you, but when I see things like this, it reminds me that humanity isn't as hopeless as it may seem at times.  It recalls the last lines of the beautiful poem "Desiderata," by Max Ehrmann, which never fails to bring me to tears, and which seems like a good place to conclude:

Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.  But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.  Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. 

Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.  You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. 

And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.  Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be.  And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul.  With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.  Be cheerful.  Strive to be happy.

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