Looking down the gun barrel

As regular readers of Skeptophilia know all too well, I have a fascination with things that are big and powerful and can kill you.

I've read book after book on earthquakes, tornadoes, and hurricanes.  I always told my students that if I hadn't become a mild-mannered science teacher, I'd have been a storm chaser, thus combining two of my favorite things -- meteorology, and things that are big and powerful and can kill you.

I suspect I am not alone in this.  Look at the common little-kid fascination with dinosaurs, and which ones tend to be the favorites -- not the peaceful herbivorous dinosaurs, but creatures like the T. rex and the Velociraptor and the Deinonychus, which would happily tear you limb from limb.  Look at disaster movies, stretching all the way back to such flicks as The Poseidon Adventure.  Look at Twister(s) and The Day After Tomorrow and Armageddon and The Perfect Storm.  Look, if you dare, at Sharknado.  What are they now up to, Sharknado 7 or something?

If not, they should be.

I think this is why there was an article in The Daily Mail called, "Death Rays From Space: Bursts of Energy From Black Holes Could Wipe Out Life on Earth WITHOUT Warning."  Which brings up a number of questions, the most important of which is, what kind of warning would you expect a black hole to give?  Do you think that a few hours before giving off a Burst of Energy, the black hole is going to post something on Twitter that says, "Beware!  I am about to wipe out all life on Earth!  #DeathRaysFTW  #SorryNotSorry"?

Be that as it may, it turns out that The Daily Mail actually got something right, an eventuality that ranks right up there with the fabled monkeys typing out the script to Hamlet.  There are stars which are capable of giving forth incredible amounts of energy in a very short amount of time.  They're called gamma-ray bursters, and are every bit as scary as they sound.  These things give off as much energy in a few seconds as the Sun will release in its entire ten billion year lifespan.  That, my friends, is what the astrophysicists refer to as "a shitload of energy."

And there's one only 7,500 light years away.  I say "only" not because that's an insignificant amount of distance, but because that's close enough that if the thing was aimed toward Earth and went off, we'd be fucked sideways.  Called Wolf-Rayet 104 (or WR-104 for short), it's a good candidate for a core-collapse supernova followed by a long-duration gamma-ray burst.

Of course, there's no particular reason to get all bent out of shape about it.  WR-104 is thought to stand a good chance of doing its thing not day after tomorrow, but some time in the next hundred thousand years.  And even then, it's pretty certain that the gamma-ray burst would be emitted in narrow jets from the magnetic poles of the star -- thus, it would only be a problem if we were literally looking right down the gun barrel, which most astronomers think we aren't.

WR-104 [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of the Keck Telescope and NASA]

That, of course, doesn't stop The Daily Mail from waxing rhapsodic about how we're all gonna die, or at least get converted into the Incredible Hulk or something.  It's happened before, they say -- some scientists apparently think a gamma-ray burst is what caused the Ordovician extinction, 440 million years ago, that wiped out 85% of all marine life (although as we saw only a few days ago, there's another equally plausible claim that it was caused by a near pass by an asteroid).  It's only later in the article that they admit that the connection between the Ordovician extinction and a gamma ray burster is "impossible to prove," and even more reluctantly mention that "in a galaxy like ours, a gamma ray burst will happen once every million years, and it would need to be pointing in the right general direction to hit us...  So, are they going to kill us?  Probably not."

Is it just me, or do they sound... disappointed by this?  I would think that the idea that the Earth is unlikely to get fried by high-intensity gamma rays would be good news.  But I guess this goes back to what I started with; there's something about dangerous stuff that is inherently attractive.  The idea that the universe is big and scary makes us appreciate even more living in our safe houses, where we are very unlikely to be eaten by velociraptors.

Myself, I think it's the raw power that these kinds of things wield that is the source of the fascination.  I remember, as a kid growing up in southern Louisiana, there was something pretty exciting about being in the bullseye of a hurricane.  I distinctly recall standing in my parents' garage during the approach of Hurricane Carmen in 1974.   Just before closing the garage door and retreating inside, my dad and I watched in awe as tree branches and garbage cans flew through the air, rain fell sideways, and lightning struck every ten seconds.  It was scary but thrilling.  (The aftermath -- being without electricity for over a week, losing everything in the fridge and freezer, and cleaning up all of the damage -- was distinctly non-thrilling, but the storm itself was pretty exciting, at least to a kid.)

So there's some strange attraction to the dangerous things in the universe.  Even if for most of them, we'd like to observe from a safe distance.  Like gamma-ray bursters.

Not to mention sharknadoes.

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Going to the dogs

Well, the Rapture happened again, and just like every other damn time, I got left behind.

At this point, I've kind of given up.  There's been, what?  Like two dozen Raptures in the past five years?  I beginning to think I'm not invited to the party.

Of course, it shouldn't be a shock, given my history.  I doubt I'll be headed to heaven unless I can somehow get there under cover of darkness via helicopter.  And even then, there's a 50/50 chance that God will smite the crap out of the chopper before we can land at the Holy Heliport.

So since I'm still stuck here on Earth and likely to be for a while, I suppose I should proceed on to looking at today's topic, which is: Dogman.

In one of those funny coincidences that would make some people think there's a Glitch in the Matrix, a couple of days ago a friend of mine (who is also a cryptid enthusiast) asked me if I'd ever heard of Dogman, and I said I had -- a long time ago -- but didn't know much of anything about him, and then the following day a post showed up on the delightfully weird JAMZA Online Forum talking about recent Dogman sightings in California.  The writer, Paul Dale Roberts, says he's an "Esoteric Detective" with Halo Paranormal Investigations, which is certainly an impressive job title.

Roberts explains that Dogman isn't a werewolf, because of the obvious dog vs. wolf distinction, but also because werewolves transform back into ordinary humans when the Moon isn't full, but Dogman is kinda stuck that way.  He talks as if Dogman is pretty terrifying, but the problem for me is, my experience of dogs is this:

This is Jethro, and the only things that would be justifiably afraid of Jethro are squeaky toys.  In his presence, squeaky toys labeled "Completely Indestructible!" last about three minutes, because that fuzzy little muzzle conceals the Jaws of Death.  But other than that, he's about as dangerous as a plush toy.  A cryptid with a human body and Jethro's head would elicit more laughter than fear.

Plus, Roberts also says that "all you have to do is clap, and Dogman runs away," which doesn't sound very threatening to me.

Still, a seven-foot-tall human/dog hybrid could be kind of alarming to run across unexpectedly.  Some of them, he says, have "glowing red eyes."  This phenomenon of glowing eyes is a pretty common trait in cryptids, which is something I've never understood.  I mean, reflective eyes, sure; a lot of animals have a tapetum, which is a reflective membrane at the back of the eyeball that is why deer's eyes shine in headlights.  But actually glowing?  Eyes receive light, they don't emit it.  What, are there little guys with flashlights in there, shining the beams out through the pupils whenever anyone comes close?

Be that as it may, Roberts proceeds to relate a number of incidents where people have seen Dogman.  Here's his own encounter:

I once saw a strange hunched-back dark green bi-pedal figure in Elk Grove [California, where several other sightings have taken place].  From the distance from where I was observing this strange sight, I was unable to make out what I was seeing.  I had to drive up closer, so I can identify this mysterious figure.  I discovered I was looking at a homeless person that was covered in a blanket.

Who, he admits rather reluctantly, had an ordinary human head. 

But other people have insisted they saw a giant guy with a dog's shaggy head, and from the sound of it they weren't anywhere near a convention of Furries at the time.  Apparently Dogman isn't a recent invention, either; the legend seems to have started in Wexford County, Michigan, where a report in 1887 describes a sighting by two lumberjacks.  This Dogman apparently had blue eyes, so that's kind of cool.

Because forewarned is forearmed, it's important to have a plan for if you ever run into Dogman.  (I mean, you can try clapping, but my guess is that won't work.)  So here's what you should do:

• Stare straight into his eyes, to establish dominance.
• Say, "Whoozagoodboy?"
• When Dogman, not knowing who the Good Boy is, looks confused, say, "YOU are!"
• Dogman will be so elated by this unexpected revelation that he will wag his tail excitedly.
• Reward him for being a Good Boy with ear skritches, and if you have any, a puppy biscuit.
• Dogman will then be your friend for life.

At least this technique works with Jethro.

Anyhow, that's our excursion into the World of the Weird for today.  On the other hand, the word "weird" describes the world as a whole pretty well, given the news lately, and Dogman is no more peculiar than, for example, Donald Trump claiming that the reason California has droughts is that people in Canada were incosiderate enough to turn off a giant faucet.  ("It's so big it takes a whole day to turn once!" he said.  And no, I didn't make any of that up.)  May as well have a look around the place, since I (and, I presume, you) missed the Rapture and are stuck here for the time being. 

At least until the next helicopter leaves for heaven.

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Onomatopoeia FTW

Given my ongoing fascination with languages, it's a little surprising that I didn't come across a paper published a while back in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences earlier.  Entitled, "Sound–Meaning Association Biases Evidenced Across Thousands of Languages," this study proposes something that is deeply astonishing: that the connection between the sounds in a word and the meaning of the word may not be arbitrary.

It's a fundamental tenet of linguistics that language is defined as "arbitrary symbolic communication."  Arbitrary because there is no special connection between the sound of a word and its meaning, with the exception of the handful of words that are onomatopoeic (such as boom, buzz, splash, and splat).  Otherwise, the phonemes that make up the word for a concept would be expected to having nothing to do with the concept itself, and therefore would vary randomly from language to language (the word bird is no more fundamentally birdy than the French word oiseau is fundamentally oiseauesque).

That idea may have to be revised.  Damián E. Blasi (of the University of Zürich), Søren Wichmann (of the University of Leiden), Harald Hammarström and Peter F. Stadler (of the Max Planck Institute), and Morten H. Christiansen (of Cornell University) did an exhaustive statistical study, using dozens of basic vocabulary words representing 62% of the world's six thousand languages and 85% of its linguistic lineages and language families.  And what they found was that there are some striking patterns when you look at the phonemes represented in a variety of linguistic morphemes, patterns that held true even with completely unrelated languages.  Here are a few of the correspondences they found:

• The word for ‘nose’ is likely to include the sounds ‘neh’ or the ‘oo’ sound, as in ‘ooze.’
• The word for ‘tongue’ is likely to have ‘l’ or ‘u.’
• ‘Leaf’ is likely to include the sounds ‘b,’ ‘p’ or ‘l.’
• ‘Sand’ will probably use the sound ‘s.’
• The words for ‘red’ and ‘round’ often appear with ‘r.’
• The word for ‘small’ often contains the sound ‘i.’
• The word for ‘I’ is unlikely to include sounds involving u, p, b, t, s, r and l.
• ‘You’ is unlikely to include sounds involving u, o, p, t, d, q, s, r and l.

"These sound symbolic patterns show up again and again across the world, independent of the geographical dispersal of humans and independent of language lineage," said Morten Christiansen, who led the study.  "There does seem to be something about the human condition that leads to these patterns.  We don’t know what it is, but we know it’s there."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons M. Adiputra, Globe of language, CC BY-SA 3.0]

One possibility is that these correspondences are actually not arbitrary at all, but are leftovers from (extremely) ancient history -- fossils of the earliest spoken language, which all of today's languages, however distantly related, descend from.  The authors write:

From a historical perspective, it has been suggested that sound–meaning associations might be evolutionarily preserved features of spoken language, potentially hindering regular sound change.  Furthermore, it has been claimed that widespread sound–meaning associations might be vestiges of one or more large-scale prehistoric protolanguages.  Tellingly, some of the signals found here feature prominently in reconstructed “global etymologies” that have been used for deep phylogeny inference.  If signals are inherited from an ancestral language spoken in remote prehistory, we might expect them to be distributed similarly to inherited, cognate words; that is, their distribution should to a large extent be congruent with the nodes defining their linguistic phylogeny.

But this point remains to be tested.  And there's an argument against it; if these similarities come from common ancestry, you'd expect not only the sounds, but their positions in words, to have been conserved (such as in the English/German cognate pair laugh and lachen).  In fact, that is not the case.  The sounds are similar, but their positions in the word show no discernible pattern.  The authors write:

We have demonstrated that a substantial proportion of words in the basic vocabulary are biased to carry or to avoid specific sound segments, both across continents and linguistic lineages.  Given that our analyses suggest that phylogenetic persistence or areal dispersal are unlikely to explain the widespread presence of these signals, we are left with the alternative that the signals are due to factors common to our species, such as sound symbolism, iconicity, communicative pressures, or synesthesia...  [A]lthough it is possible that the presence of signals in some families are symptomatic of a particularly pervasive cognate set, this is not the usual case.  Hence, the explanation for the observed prevalence of sound–meaning associations across the world has to be found elsewhere.

Which I think is both astonishing and fascinating.  What possible reason could there be that the English word tree is composed of the three phonemes it contains?  The arbitrariness of the sound/meaning relationship seemed so obvious to me when I first learned about it that I didn't even stop to question how we know it's true.

Generally a dangerous position for a skeptic to be in.

I hope that the research on this topic is moving forward, because it certainly would be cool to find out what's actually going on here.  I'll have to keep my eyes out for any follow-ups.  But now I'm going to go get a cup of coffee, which I think we can all agree is a nice, warm, comforting-sounding word.

  

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Acting on absurdities

My grandma used to say, "When someone shows you who they are, believe them -- the first time."

It's good advice, and when I haven't heeded it, I've almost always lived to regret it.  It's not that I think people can't change; it's just that most of them don't.

In the particular case I'm thinking of, though, it's not the first time, nor the tenth, nor (probably) the thousandth time that we've been shown precisely who someone is.  And it will come as no shock to most of you that I, once again, am talking about Donald Trump.

What brought me back to this distasteful topic is the ongoing nonsense about migrants in Springfield, Ohio eating people's pets.  There has been, says both Trump and his running mate J. D. Vance, a "flood" of over twenty thousand Haitian immigrants into Springfield, overcrowding schools, triggering a crime wave, and overwhelming both police and the prior (read "white") residents.

There is not a shred of truth to any of this.  The most recent data shows that there are about 5,200 people from Haiti in all of Ohio.  There is no credible evidence whatsoever that anyone's pets have been killed.  There's no crime wave, no swarm of refugees into schools, no... anything.

But confronted by these facts, both Trump and Vance simply doubled down on the rhetoric, as they always do.  Interviewed on CNN, Vance told Dana Bash that he knew it wasn't true, but that he was allowed "to create stories so that the… media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people."

Funny how when I was little, that was called "lying" and was frowned upon.  When I was a few years older, I found out that's what "bearing false witness against thy neighbor" meant.

You know, that thing in the Ten Commandments?  The same Ten Commandments these people want plastered on every public school classroom wall?

Or does that commandment not apply if thy neighbor has dark skin?

But because anything that comes out of Dear Leader's mouth (or his cronies' mouths) is automatically considered true by his followers, the result has been the college in Springfield holding virtual classes because of malicious and threatening calls, public schools (including an elementary school) on lockdown, and the mayor getting death threats because he had the temerity to state publicly that Trump and Vance had lied.

The reality of Springfield.  Not that you'll hear about this from the Republicans.

It doesn't end there.  The second abortive assassination attempt on Trump led both Vance and Donald Trump Jr. to blame "radical leftists" (despite the fact that neither of the would-be assassins were leftists by any stretch, much less radical ones).  Elon Musk, who just will not keep his fucking mouth shut, commented that it was funny how no one had attempted to assassinate Kamala Harris or Joe Biden, then Vance followed it up with saying that it was the Democrats who need to tone down their rhetoric. 

It's right from Joseph Goebbels's playbook; accuse your opponents of what you're doing yourself.

At this point, if you still support Trump, you own all of this.  Every last scrap of it.  You know who he is, and chances are you've known for a long while.  And if -- every god ever worshiped forbid -- he wins reelection in November, you will own every last thing he does.  Because he's told us, you know?  He's told us over and over and over again.  Here are a few of the things he's said himself -- i.e., this is not me speculating.  This is right from his own mouth.

• There'll be the largest deportation of immigrants (legal and illegal) in American history.
• There'll be sky-high tariffs on imported goods, especially anything from China.  (He seems not to understand that tariffs are not paid by the country the import came from, but by the consumer in the recipient country.)
• He will withdraw all U. S. support for Ukraine.
• He plans to get rid of U. S. military leaders who are "woke" -- defined, of course, however he wants to.
• He will cut funding for any schools that have support systems in place for LGBTQ+ students, and those that have vaccine or mask mandates.  That, too, is "woke."
• He will jail his critics in the press -- and even went so far as to say he'd find a way to silence ordinary citizens who oppose him.

If I wake up on the morning of November 6 and find that Trump has won, you -- his supporters -- will bear the blame for every last horror he perpetrates, everyone whose voice is silenced, every legal asylum seeker who is sent back to face imprisonment, injury, or death.  You will be responsible for every freedom lost to Americans because Donald Trump's fragile ego can't handle being contradicted.  You will be responsible for every queer child who is denied help and who ends up committing suicide.  (And don't @ me about how "this never happens."  The suicide rate among LGBTQ+ teens is four times the average for straight teens.  And I was -- twice -- very nearly one of those queer teens who succeeded.)

If he's reelected, you will swallow the responsibility for all of that, swallow it down to the last vile-tasting drop.

It all boils down to what Voltaire said, almost three hundred years ago -- a quote I had on my own classroom wall: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

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A circle of light

The Ordovician Period was a strange time in Earth's (pre)history.

It lasted a little over forty million years, from about 485 million years ago to 444 million years ago.  Coming out of the Cambrian Period, there was incredible diversity in marine life, especially invertebrates like arthropods, mollusks, and brachiopods; and at the beginning it was very hot -- not far off from the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, which had a global average temperature almost ten degrees higher than it is today.  But over the next forty million years, the climate went into a slow slide, ending with what is called the "Hirnantian Icehouse," a period of widespread continental glaciation.  The climate shift triggered a mass extinction, one of the "Big Five," and an estimated eighty percent of marine species went extinct.

But unlike the later Permian-Triassic and Cretaceous Extinctions, this one wasn't at all sudden -- suggesting that the causes of the other two mentioned, a massive volcanic eruption and an asteroid strike respectively, might not have been responsible.

So what triggered the climatic shift and die-off?

One thing was simply plate movement; by the end of the Ordovician, Gondwana (what is now Africa, South America, Antarctica, and Australia) were near the South Pole, which led to the formation of glaciers.  But it's hard to see how that by itself would have had such an enormous effect on life worldwide.

A paper this week in Earth and Planetary Science Letters proposes a curious solution, hinging on a peculiar observation; there was a meteorite barrage around 466 million years ago, during the middle of the Ordovician.  Extant rocks of that age show dozens of impact craters.  But... those craters are almost entirely limited to regions that were within thirty degrees of the equator at the time.

The researchers estimate that the likelihood of that occurring by chance is equivalent to flipping a coin 21 times and getting tails every time.  But if they were connected, there's the problem that the extinction didn't occur right after the barrage; there was an almost twenty million year gap between the impact array and the icehouse/extinction.  It's apparent that the strikes didn't directly trigger the extinction.

What the researchers propose is a near strike by a large asteroid -- one that, had it hit square on (as the Chicxulub Meteorite would do almost exactly four hundred million years later) would have been in the planet-killer category.  But it did pass inside the Roche limit, the distance a smaller object can pass a planet at which the gravity holding the passing asteroid together is exceeded by the tidal forces trying to tear it apart.

So rather than going into orbit, or crashing into the Earth in one piece, the asteroid got shredded.  The larger chunks went into decaying trajectories and ultimately impacted Earth near their orbital planes (parallel to the Earth's equator -- resulting in the odd distribution of craters), and the rest got spun out into...

... a ring system.

[Image credit: Oliver Hull]

The researchers think the rings shaded the Earth from enough of the Sun's warmth and light that it precipitated a slow decline into an ice age, and coupled with the movement of a big section of the Earth's crust down to near the South Pole, a worldwide icehouse.  But because it was a gradual drop in temperature, the hit on biodiversity didn't happen all at once -- although by the end, it certainly was big enough to rank amongst the largest mass extinctions ever.

But -- a ring system.  Can you imagine what that'd have looked like?

Of course, it's not like taking a time machine back to the late Ordovician would be all that hot an idea, and I mean that both literally and figuratively.  Notwithstanding how gawdawful cold it'd have been, there would also be the problem of finding food.  Plants had yet to colonize the land -- that wouldn't happen until the next geological period, the Silurian -- so the continents were basically one barren expanse of rock, dirt, and sand. 

But still.  Standing there in that empty landscape, and you look up, and arching over your head, spanning the entire dome of the sky, are these broad rings, a circular belt shining in reflected light.

We used to think rings were uncommon; for a long time, Saturn was the only planet known to have them.  But better telescopes and (especially) flybys have found ring systems around all four of the gas giants.  Now, if the current paper bears up under scrutiny, we might add Earth to the list.  Eventually, the Earth's ring system scattered and decayed away -- gravitational interactions between multiple objects of similar sizes are inherently unstable -- allowing the Earth to warm again, leading into the swampy, hot Silurian and Carboniferous Periods.

But for a while, we had what must have been an awe-inspiring adornment.

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Time marches on

I was observing to a friend a couple of days ago how fast this year is going by.  It seems like only a week or two ago that we were all complaining about adjusting to writing 2024 on our checks, and here it is September, with the Autumnal Equinox less than a week away.

Thus far it's been a wild, and rapid, ride.  We've had the hottest year on record, and that's with some stiff competition from the past twenty years.  War is still raging in Ukraine and Gaza.  Donald Trump is still shrieking about evil immigrants eating pets, which for some unexplained reason does not result in his handlers squirting horse tranquilizers down his throat with a turkey baster.

So pretty much the status quo, weird though it may be.

But if you think time's rushing by as-is, it's nothing compared a proposal to revamp our calendar.  According to a video by the Munich-based filmmakers that call themselves "Kurzgesagt" (German for "in brief"), we shouldn't be in the year 2024, we should be in 12,024.

The reason for this proposal is that marking our calendar based upon the beginning of Christianity is a fairly arbitrary zero year, given how many people in the world aren't Christian.  Plus, having a great swatch of history marked by the backwards-running "B.C." scale is confusing and unnecessary.  So Philipp Dettmer and his friends at Kurzgesagt have suggested a new scale, and one that conveniently would only require the addition of a "1" at the beginning of our current year.

So what happened 12,024 years ago that's so special?  Dettmer says this is when the first known permanent stone building was built in the hills of southern Anatolia, in what is now Turkey, marking the point at which we began to "build a new world on top of the old one."  At that point, we set in motion the massive terraforming operation that has characterized humanity ever since.

This would mean that we would do away with the old "B.C." and "A.D." designations; all years on the calendar after that point (and thus all of recorded history) would run forward and would be "H.E."  (Human Era).

Roman calendar from the 1st century B.C.E., or the 99th century H.E., whichever you prefer (Image is in the Public Domain]

Okay, there are a few problems with this.

First of all, the temple that Dettmer et al. are referencing -- Göbekli Tepe, near the town of Şanlıurfa -- was not built 12,024 years ago, it was founded around 11,150 years ago, which is a 900-odd year discrepancy.  This is according to the oldest radiocarbon dates we have from the site, so it seems like a good estimate.  So if you really do want to measure the years based on the founding of this temple, you'd have to do more than simply adding a "1" to the beginning of the current calendar year, you'd have to add 9,126, which is not nearly as convenient.

Second, I wonder if they've considered the level of conniption that would be thrown by the Religious Right if this was seriously proposed.  These, after all, are the same people who founded the War on Christmas trope, which claims (among other things) that Starbucks changing its winter cup design every year is the moral equivalent of strafing the Three Wise Men while they're on their way to Bethlehem.  These are also the same people who regularly send me hate mail when I use "B.C.E." and "C.E." ("Before Common Era" and "Common Era") instead of B.C. and A.D.  (One memorable one said, "You're so much in love with your lord and master Satan you can't even bear to write Christ's name in an abbreviation.  You're despicable."  Which became a lot funnier when the final sentence made me think of reading the entire thing in a Daffy Duck voice, so I did.  You should try it.)

Hell, we're the culture that couldn't even agree to switching over to using metric units.  Nope, gotta stick with feet, inches, pounds, ounces, hundredweights, and furlongs per fortnight.  'Murika!  Fuck yeah!

Then there's a third issue, which is that it's not like we don't have commemoration of other deities in other parts of our timekeeping system, such as the days (Tiw, Woden, Thor, and Freyja) and months (Januarius, Februarius, Mars, Maia, Juno).  The difference is that pretty much no one worships any of these gods any more, which in Thor's case is kind of a shame because he was a serious badass, and if you count his movie appearances, drop-dead sexy as well.

Of course, it's not like calendar-keeping ever was a particularly exact science.  Our current zero year (well, 1 C.E., as there's no Year Zero in the contemporary calendar) is supposed to be based on the birth of Jesus, but the problem is, the most recent scholarship on the topic -- calculated from known dates of Roman emperors' reigns and the lives of biblical figures such as Herod -- has concluded that Jesus was born in 4 B.C.E.  He also wasn't born on December 25, but probably some time in the spring, given that "the shepherds were tending their lambs in the fields."  The settlement on December 25 as the date for the celebration of Jesus's birth probably started some time mid-fourth century, and a lot of folks think that the date was chosen because it coincided with the part of the year when the Romans celebrated Saturnalia, a solstice festival associated with meals, get-togethers, and gift-giving (sound familiar?).  The idea was that if you sanctified the date by putting a Christian spin on the celebration, you could let the former pagans still have their party but pretend it was something holier.  The church fathers figured with luck, the recent converts would eventually forget about the pagan part and focus only on the holy part, which 1,700 years later still hasn't happened, given Christmas trees, Santa Claus, and Black Friday specials at Walmart.

Now, my point is not that any of the above stuff is exact, either; the spring 4 B.C.E. date for Jesus's birth still rests on a lot of guesswork.  It's more that our calendar-keeping isn't based on anything real as it is.  It's hard enough to keep up with the inevitable vagaries that are engendered by the fact that the Earth's rotation and revolution cycles don't line up especially well, which is why we have leap days every four years.  In fact, when that change was made, it was because in the sixteenth century, the powers-that-be were beginning to notice that the solstices and equinoxes, and more importantly from their point of view the holy days, were coming unglued from the dates they were supposed to occur on.  So this prompted the reformation of the calendar called the Gregorian calendar, which fixed the beginning of the year at January 1 (before, the date that marked the beginning of a new year varied from December 25 to March 25, depending on whom you asked), and added an extra day in February every four years to keep it from happening again.  The adoption of the Gregorian calendar caused the loss of 13 days (February 1 was immediately followed by February 14).  And even it wasn't adopted smoothly and universally -- the Republic of Venice adopted the new calendar in 1582; Great Britain waited until 1750; and Russia and Serbia didn't cave in until 1918.

You can just imagine the hell this played with people's international engagement calendars.  (Actually, the author Umberto Eco used this very idea as one of the many plot twists in his novel Foucault's Pendulum, which might well be the most brilliantly intricate novel ever written.)

So trying to make a major-scale, simultaneous, worldwide change to time-keeping would be too much for us, I think.

Me, I think if we're really going to have a meaningful calendar, we should start with the real milestone, which is the Big Bang.  Now that's a real Zero Year.  And it makes the fact that we've only got three and a half months left in 13,800,002,024 A.B.B. seems like not such a big deal after all.

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Bell ringer

Sometimes we dodge a bullet.

In September of 2023, seismologists all over the world recorded an odd periodic signal that lasted about nine days.  It was strongest in Europe and eastern North America, but was recorded in places far distant.  The first pulses of the signal had the highest amplitude, and it gradually faded in intensity afterward; the effect was very much like the sound waves generated by a struck bell, which begin loud and eventually diminish into silence once the metal stops vibrating.

It took a while for the geologists to figure out what caused the signal, and when they did, it caused a few gasps -- and then sighs of relief.

The climate-change-induced warmup in the polar regions has caused a huge loss of ice mass in Greenland and Antarctica, and the main associated hazard we've been warned about is sea level rise.  But the September 2023 event highlights another potential problem.  The source of the seismic signal was the collapse of a 1.2-kilometer-high mountain peak into remote Dickson Fjord in Greenland, triggered by the thinning of an ice wall that had held back the rock and debris.  When the estimate 25 million cubic meter landslide hit the water, it triggered a tsunami over a hundred meters high that proceeded to slosh back and forth across the fjord about once every ninety seconds, creating a vibration in the Earth's crust that was picked up on seismometers thousands of kilometers away.

Dickson Fjord, Greenland [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Bjoertvedt, Dicksonfjorden IMG 8800, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The reason I call this "dodging a bullet" is twofold.  First, Dickson Fjord is far away from human settlements; the only damage was to an at-the-time-unoccupied patrol station on Ella Ø, an island seventy or so kilometers away, where the tsunami height was about four meters.  Second, Dickson Fjord is narrow, with a lot of twists and turns, so most of the energy of the tsunami was expended by the sloshing of water back and forth across the inlet; little of the energy made it out of the mouth of the fjord into the north Atlantic.

The analysis of the seismograph data, and their cause, were the subject of a paper in Science this week.

"When I first saw the seismic signal, I was completely baffled," said Stephen Hicks, geologist at University College London, who co-authored the study, in an interview with Science Daily.  "Even though we know seismometers can record a variety of sources happening on Earth's surface, never before has such a long-lasting, globally-traveling seismic wave, containing only a single frequency of oscillation, been recorded.  This inspired me to co-lead a large team of scientists to figure out the puzzle.  Our study of this event amazingly highlights the intricate interconnections between climate change in the atmosphere, destabilization of glacier ice in the cryosphere, movements of water bodies in the hydrosphere, and Earth's solid crust in the lithosphere.  This is the first time that water sloshing has been recorded as vibrations through the Earth's crust, traveling the world over and lasting several days."

It's sobering to think of what would have happened had the landslide occurred in a cliff facing the open ocean, and not in a narrow, remote fjord.  Without anything to damp the oscillations and act as a shock absorber to dissipate the energy of the landslide, the displaced water would have created an unimpeded tsunami that might have wrought havoc on populated coastlines.

We lucked out.

Addressing climate change should be a priority not only for the obvious reasons -- mitigating extremes of weather, slowing down sea level rise, and minimizing the impacts on biodiversity and agriculture.  But the warming Earth increases our risks of other, more sudden and unexpected, hazards, ones that are impossible to predict and therefore way harder to protect ourselves against.  Decreasing our reliance on fossil fuels isn't going to be an easy fix, but in the long run, the dangers of accelerating climate change far outweigh the problems created by our efforts to slow it down.

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