What will continue

Like many Americans, I spent most of yesterday in a state of shock and incredulity.  I felt, honestly, like I'd been kicked in the gut.  It's not that I thought a Harris presidency was a foregone conclusion; but the margin by which she lost was a horrible wake-up call, and a reminder that racism, sexism, xenophobia, and Christian nationalism are still forces to be reckoned with.

In yesterday's post, I gave voice to my anger that a man like Donald Trump could win a national election not once, but twice.  All of us know exactly who he is, or should.  When the chaos comes, which I am certain it will, no one will have available the excuse of "we didn't know."  Whatever else you can say about him, he's never been stealthy.

The lion's share of the blame, though, goes to the corporate capitalists who bankrolled and supported him -- men like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Rupert Murdoch -- purely out of self-interest.  Also to the media, which scrutinized every damn thing Kamala Harris said and did, and gave Donald Trump carte blanche to babble nonsense and fraternize with racists and right-wing extremists of the worst sort, barely giving any of it a mention.  (Of course, those are not unrelated factors; the media itself is controlled by the very wealthy, who more than anyone else stand to gain from a Trump presidency.)

So yesterday was devoted to processing my own rage.

But today, I'm trying to figure out how I and my family and friends are going to cope with all this.  Just feeling hopeful for the future is a struggle right now.  But when hope is far away, you have to fall back on commitment.  So in today's post I want to focus on what will continue -- what I did last week, when I was still hopeful that sanity would prevail, and will still do now, when I am forced to concede that it did not.

So here's what I'm going to do going forward.

• I will continue to take care of my family and friends, to let them know I'm here when they need me, and to fight like hell for them when I have to.

• I will always be a voice for marginalized communities, especially religious and ethnic minorities, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people, and I vow to protect them physically and materially if it becomes necessary.

• I will continue to write about critical issues like climate change, public health policy, and the environment, regardless of the repercussions.

• I will stand up to bullies who attempt to destroy our rights and freedoms, even if it's at risk of my own bodily harm.

• I will speak truth to power.

• I will keep doing the small things -- tending my garden, making good food for my family and friends, and giving loving homes to our wonderful canine companions.

• I will continue to support artists, writers, and musicians and their commitment to bring some beauty into this poor, struggling world -- and I will continue to create as well.

• Tomorrow, I will be back to writing about cool and interesting stuff here at Skeptophilia, because teaching and learning and curiosity and humor will always be important.

• I will never, ever stop fighting for what is right, what is true, what is compassionate, and what is kind.

Even in my optimistic moments, I suspect we've got some dark times ahead.  Nothing will change my stance that American voters made a huge, huge, mistake on Tuesday, and will all too soon be finding that out.  But despite all that, I'm determined to keep putting one foot in front of the other, and to make sure that the people I love are doing the same thing.

Day by day, step by step.  It's all we can do.  That, and to help each other.  So check up on the people you care about.  Frequently.  Don't be afraid to reach out when you need help, or even a hug or a shoulder to cry on; you'll find it.

Whatever happened two days ago, and whatever will happen in the upcoming days and weeks, keep your mind focused on the things that need to continue, and turn your hope into a rock-solid commitment to hold fast to those.

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Freefall

Well, voting day is done, and although the dust has yet to settle, it appears to have gone as badly as it possibly could have.

I'm sick to my stomach right now, and it's going to take me a long time to process this.  The nation I live in, and thought I understood, has apparently chosen to hand the reins of power to an egocentric, megalomanic sociopath who has never cared about a single thing other than his own self-aggrandizement.  He has no morals, no ethics, no conscience, and over half the United States thinks that he's who we want (for a second time) as leader.

To say I'm sick at heart is a vast understatement.  I'm also deeply, deeply mystified at how nothing this man does ever seems to alienate his followers.  How could what he's done not make a difference?  You MAGA types claim to be "values voters," so where are your values?

Very early on, Trump publicly mocked a disabled reporter,  He called women "fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals" -- then was asked about this comment at a debate by (very conservative) moderator Megyn Kelly.  He gave a waffling answer, but afterward said about Kelly in an interview with Don Lemon, "She gets out and she starts asking me all sorts of ridiculous questions.  You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever."  Worse, he -- now infamously -- said in an interview that when you're famous, women will let you do anything, up to including "grabbing them by the pussy."

None of this, apparently, was enough to convince you that this man is amoral.

He's a convicted felon 34 times over, faces numerous other charges that have yet to go to trial, is an adjudicated sex abuser and a multiply-accused rapist, including of under-age girls.  Of course, now he's certain to pardon himself for everything, but the fact remains that these convictions and allegations stand.

And that wasn't enough, either.

He claimed that failing to clap for his speeches was "treason."  He called the press "the enemy of the people" and just last week said that he wouldn't object if his followers "shot through the fake news" -- as well as specifically aiming their guns and firing at Liz Cheney, a Republican who has been a vocal critic of Trump and MAGA.  He said outright he'd be a dictator "from day one," and that his first priority would be exacting revenge against his critics, whom he calls "the enemy within."

We tried to lay out the obvious parallels with pre-World-War-II Nazi propaganda, but you weren't listening.

Speaking of the World Wars, in 2018 on a trip to Europe he refused to go to Aisne-Marne American Cemetery to honor the fallen American soldiers, and he said, "Why should I go to that cemetery?  It's filled with losers."  His contempt for veterans is incontrovertible; he commented on John McCain's service with a dismissive comment of "I like people who weren't captured."  This from someone who was deferred from service because of apparently imaginary bone spurs.

But that didn't do it, either.

He's stated that he's going to hand over economic control of the government to the man who took one of the most successful social media platforms ever created and drove it into the ground and the control of health care to a raving lunatic who wants to end vaccination and remove fluoride from tap water, and his response to the escalating climate crisis is "Drill baby drill, and frack frack frack!"

Those apparently don't alarm you in the least.

It seems like any one of these should have been sufficient, but the fact is, all of this stuff put together didn't make a single damn bit of difference.  He still had fervent support from evangelical Christians despite in an interview being unable to come up with a single Bible verse he liked, and calling the New Testament book "Two Corinthians."  He's a pathological liar, a serial adulterer, a financial cheat, and he and his kids were found guilty of stealing money from a children's cancer charity.  And yet the religious subset of MAGA acted as if he were the Second Coming of Christ, even creating images like this one:

This is the man you've chosen to run our country.

I'm angry, scared, confused, and lord have mercy, I am exhausted to the core of my being.  The voters have handed our country to monsters -- not only Trump, but right-wing extremists like J. D. Vance and the architects of Project 2025.  We are going to see the United States turned into a place where women, minorities, legal immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, atheists, and dissenters are not safe.

You voted for that.  I don't give a flying fuck what your reason was; you MAGA types chose to cast your vote for everything he represents and all the long, long litany of horrible things he's said and done.  And whatever happens next, you own every last bit of it.

I don't know what else to say.  I, and other moderates and liberals, feel like we're in freefall right now.  

I will continue to speak out, to my last breath.  But right now, mostly what I want to do is weep.

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Wandering through Lemuria

Today's post is brought to you by the Department of One Thing Leads to Another.

Philip Lutley Sclater (1829-1913) was a distinguished British biologist with a long and illustrious career.  He was an expert ornithologist, but his knowledge extended to just about every group of living things.  He is considered to have founded the science of biogeography -- linking evolution to the geographical regions where assemblages of species live -- and because of his contributions, he has no fewer than eleven species named after him.

It was while he was studying the biogeography of Africa and India that he noticed something odd.  Madagascar is the home to a group called lemurs -- relatively small-bodied, large-eyed primates that are thought to have branched off from other primate groups on the order of fifty million years ago.  Inquiries by Sclater and others into paleontology found fossils of lemurs and lemur-like primates not only in Madagascar and east Africa, but in India; more curious, though, is that there were no similar fossils anywhere to be found in North Africa or the Middle East.

So how did they get from southern Africa to India, and leave no fossils behind along the way?

Continental Africa to Madagascar is possible; it requires crossing the Mozambique Channel, but that's at least plausible.  But the Indian Ocean?  Seems like a long way for a lemur (or, more accurately, at least two lemurs) to swim, so how could this be explained?

Sclater proposed that the landmasses of India and East Africa were once connected.  Given that this was 1864, and prior to any knowledge of continental drift and plate tectonics, the continents were believed to stay firmly where they were; so the only possibility Sclater could come up with was that there had once been dry land where the western Indian Ocean now is.  A "lost continent," as it were, drowned beneath the sea.

Because he'd come up with the idea based on the distribution of lemur fossils, Sclater called the continent "Lemuria."

Lots of other biologists thought this explanation was pretty nifty, and even the prominent German researcher Ernst Haeckel gave it his imprimatur, adding that maybe this could be a possible location for the origin of the human species.

The problem was, when the first attempts were made at sounding in the western Indian Ocean, it seemed way too deep for Sclater's explanation to be plausible.  It was known that the vagaries of ice ages and other climatic shifts made the sea levels rise and fall, but even Sclater's most ardent supporters began to wonder how Lemuria could have sunk by thousands of meters, leaving no traces whatsoever.  Then, when Alfred Wegener and others began to take the idea of continental drift seriously, it explained the distribution of lemur fossils (and other similar examples that had been discovered in the interim) without positing a lost continent.  India itself had moved, carrying its flora, fauna, and fossil assemblage with it, accounting for the odd biogeography of the lemurs (and the origin of the Himalayas thrown in as an added benefit).

Lemuria had been a good guess, as these things go, but seemed to be another example of Thomas Henry Huxley's quip that the tragedy of science is "the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact."  So you'd think that'd be that.

You'd be wrong.  Because enter, stage left, one Helena Petrovna von Hahn Blavatsky.

Helena Blavatsky in 1877 [Image is in the Public Domain]

Blavatsky was a very, very odd character.  She was widely traveled, making her way through Europe, Turkey, the Middle East, India, and Tibet, and mostly seemed to use her wanderings to pick up pieces of esoteric lore.  And what she didn't find, she was quite content to make up herself.  She claimed that one of her books, The Secret Doctrine, was based on a mysterious and holy text from Tibet called The Book of Dzyan, which appears to have been a complete fabrication of her own.  This sort of thing notwithstanding, she gained a cult following, eventually founding a movement called Theosophy, which -- with no apparent sense of irony -- has this as its symbol:

Well, Blavatsky loved the idea of Lemuria.  It gave her a place where her Ascended Masters had lived, whose spirits she claimed to still be able to converse with.  Lemuria became, so to speak, the Atlantis of the East; a place that had been the home of a Golden Age of Humanity, eventually destroyed by the wickedness of a few, but from which there were still relic documents scattered around the world that the wise could learn from (and of course which Blavatsky would be happy to tell you all about).

Except for two inconvenient facts: (1) Lemuria never existed, and (2) the documents Blavatsky "translated" were almost all forgeries.

This didn't stop her from claiming that science supported her claims, citing Sclater's scholarly papers as evidence and conveniently not mentioning any of the later ones that had shot down Sclater's hypothesis.

The whole thing gained additional momentum when early twentieth century horror writers like H. P. Lovecraft got on board, mentioning Lemuria as one of the places the Elder Gods had lived.  Lovecraft even mentions The Book of Dzyan in his story "The Diary of Alonzo Typer:"

I learned of The Book of Dzyan, whose first six chapters antedate the Earth, and which was old when the lords of Venus came through space in their ships to civilize our planet.

This, of course, added further fuel to the fire, because although most people knew Lovecraft's stories were fiction, maybe -- just maybe -- the various books he mentioned weren't.  Which explains why you can buy Abdul Alhazred's Necronomicon on Amazon, even though Lovecraft himself made up both the "mad Arab" and his "monstrous and abhorred book," something he said outright in a letter to fellow writer Robert Bloch:

By the way—there is no "Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred."  That hellish & forbidden volume is an imaginative conception of mine, which others of the W.T. group have also used as a background of allusion.

But of course... he would say that, wouldn't he?  *slow single-eyebrow raise*

If things haven't gotten eye-rollingly convoluted enough, we have one last person to introduce, which is Tamil scholar and fervent nationalist Devaneya Pavanar.  In the early twentieth century, Pavanar was trying to do two things, one of which was considerably more laudable than the other: (1) develop a comprehensive linguistics of the Tamil language, and (2) establish the Tamils as the culture from which all language, literature, religion, music, art, and science worldwide ultimately sprang.  The current Tamils live mostly in southern India and Sri Lanka, but despite his best efforts, Pavanar found that there was little hard evidence in those regions available to support that latter idea.  So instead of going, "Okay, I guess I musta been wrong, then," he latched onto Sclater's hypothesis, via Blavatsky, and decided that Lemuria was indeed the home of a lost Golden Age of Humanity, but it had been run entirely by the ancestors of today's Tamil people, so that had to be where all the evidence had gone; it was sunk under the waves of the western Indian Ocean.

He said the Tamil name for Lemuria was Kumari Kandam, and claimed that science supported his contention -- like Blavatsky, leaving out the unfortunate footnote that all the science in the intervening years had disproven the whole damn thing.  The brilliant Tamil poet Seshagiri Sastri said that Kumari Kandam was "a mere fiction originated by the prolific imagination of Tamil poets," but that appears to have convinced no one who wasn't already convinced.

And because it fell right in line with Pavanar's extremely popular ethnocentric claims, the idea of Kumari Kandam made its way into science textbooks in Tamil Nadu and parts of Sri Lanka, and in some places is still taught as scientifically-accepted fact, despite the fact that there is exactly zero evidence -- not a single artifact brought up from the western Indian Ocean seafloor, no submerged buildings, no geological evidence of a drowned continent, nothing -- supporting any of it.

All of which makes me want to take Ockham's Razor and slit my wrists with it.

So there you are.  What started out as a reasonable (if, ultimately, incorrect) guess by a reputable scientist still lives on today because a flock of woo-woos led by a loony Russian mystic and a Tamil-first extremist grabbed it and ran right off the cliff with it.  Which I guess is yet another indication that you don't need any evidence at all to fall for a claim that supports what you already believed to be true.

Me, I prefer actual science, but some days I appear to be in the minority.

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A wolf, a disk, and a lighthouse

Because here in the United States, many Americans are looking at tomorrow's election the way a man walking in a railway tunnel sees the headlights of an approaching train, today I'd like to direct your attention away from the Earth entirely, into the cold, desolate voids of outer space.

Which, all things considered, seem like a pretty congenial place by comparison.

In the past week we've had three cool astronomical discoveries announced, highlighting the exciting fact of how much more we have left to learn about the universe in which we live.  The first comes from the European Southern Observatory, which got some fantastic new images of a nebula in the constellation Scorpio called the Dark Wolf Nebula, which (fitting to its name) they released on Halloween:

[Image credit: European Southern Observatory]

The Dark Wolf, and other dark nebulae -- such as the famous Coalsack Nebula in the constellation Crux -- are aggregations of dust and gas that shroud stars behind them.  They're far from being passive light-blockers, however; dark nebulae are often the sites of rapid star formation, as the material collapses into clumps and fusion starts.  Once this occurs, the radiation pressure from the newly-formed stars blows away the extra dust, revealing the newborn star cluster, such as what we see now in the Orion Nebula and the Pleaides.

The second study is a bit of a puzzle, and involves the star Vega, a bright star in the constellation Lyra easily visible in the Northern Hemisphere at this time of year.  Vega is only 25 light years away, and was made famous as the origin of the alien signal in the movie Contact, which remains my all-time favorite movie.

Vega is a young A-class blue-white star about twice the Sun's mass, forty times brighter, and almost 4,000 C hotter (surface temperature).  Because of its luminosity and proximity, it's one of the most intensively-studied stars in the sky, and a recent announcement by NASA (based on data from the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes) indicate that it's got a feature that's peculiar by any standards -- and suggest that one scene in Contact was downright prescient.

In the movie, astronomer Ellie Arroway intercepts a transmission from an advanced technological species which contains instructions on how to build a device that warps space and time, allowing a passenger to cross interstellar distances and drop in for a visit.  When Arroway (after many twists and turns and setbacks) ends up taking a ride in the device, it brings her to Vega, where she sees a massive debris disk -- but no planets.

And that's exactly what Hubble and the JWST found.  Having a debris disk isn't at all unusual; after all, current models indicate that planet formation occurs by gravitational clumping from a flat disk surrounding the parent star (much as stars coalesce from dust and gas in dark nebulae).  But what's strange is that Vega's disk is almost entirely homogeneous, made up of a circular sheet of similar-sized particles.  No planets at all.

"Between the Hubble and Webb telescopes, you get this very clear view of Vega," said team member Andras Gáspár of the University of Arizona. " It's a mysterious system because it's unlike other circumstellar disks we've looked at.  The Vega disk is smooth, ridiculously smooth."

There appears to be a trend toward gradually decreasing size at the edges of the disk, thought to be because radiation pressure tends to blow small particles outward more efficiently than larger ones.  But other than that, the disk is relatively featureless, which is something not seen in other stars of similar ages and characteristics, such as Fomalhaut in the constellation Piscis Australis.

"Given the physical similarity between the stars of Vega and Fomalhaut, why does Fomalhaut seem to have been able to form planets and Vega didn't?" said team member George Rieke, also of the University of Arizona.  "What's the difference?  Did the circumstellar environment, or the star itself, create that difference?  What's puzzling is that the same physics is at work in both."

The last story will appeal to anyone who likes to think about the extremes which nature can sometimes achieve, and has to do with something that's pretty astonishing all by itself -- neutron stars.  Neutron stars form from the gravitational core collapse of a star greater than about 1.4 solar masses; the outer atmosphere gets blown away in a supernova, and the core falls inward, overcoming electrostatic repulsion and electron degeneracy pressure, which has the effect of crushing electrons into atomic nuclei, forming (in essence) a gigantic ball of neutrons.

This means neutron stars are some of the densest known objects.  A matchbox-sized chunk of a typical neutron star would weigh three billion tonnes.  But they have another wild characteristic, which is why the topic comes up today; most of them rotate like crazy.

The reason is conservation of angular momentum -- the same reason that a spinning figure skater increases her rotational speed as she brings her arms inward.  When a neutron star collapses, this reduces its effective radius (what physicists call the moment of inertia), and the rate of rotation increases to compensate.

When the neutron star is emitting jets of radiation, this creates an effect like the beams from a lighthouse -- which is how we get pulsars.

The nebula surrounding the pulsar PSR B1509-58, which glows because of the radiation jets from the neutron star [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]

And now, a team at the Technological University of Denmark has found a neutron star with a spin rate of an almost unimaginable 716 rotations per second, putting it in a tie for the fastest spinning astronomical object known.

"We were studying thermonuclear explosions from this system and then found remarkable oscillations, suggesting a neutron star spinning around its centre axis at an astounding 716 times per second," said Gaurava K. Jaisawal, first author on the study, which was published last week in the Astrophysical Journal.  "If future observations confirm this, the 4U 1820-30 neutron star would be one of the fastest-spinning objects ever observed in the universe, matched only by another neutron star called PSR J1748-2446."

So those are our cool discoveries in outer space for today.  And now, I suppose that we should reluctantly turn our attention back to the planet we live on.  If you live in the United States, please please please vote tomorrow.  If you live elsewhere, you might direct a prayer to whatever deity you happen to favor.  I know I've been a disbeliever for a good long while, but hell, at this point we need all the help we can get.

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Time to act

I know we really don't need anything else to worry about.  World events have been depressing enough, and here in the United States we've got an election on Tuesday that is making me pop Xanax as if they were Skittles.  But I ran across something in a book I'm reading that was absolutely jaw-dropping, and not in a good way, and I knew I would be seriously remiss in not writing about it here.

I mentioned a few days ago (in a post about some bizarre volcanoes in the East African Rift Zone) that I've been reading Tamsin Mather's wonderful book Adventures in Volcanoland: What Volcanoes Tell Us About the World and Ourselves.  Mather's specialty is monitoring gas production from volcanoes, and using the composition of offgassed material to gather information about magma characteristics and the likelihood of eruptions.  She's traveled all over the world collecting and analyzing samples, comparing hotspot volcanoes (like the ones in Hawaii) to rift volcanoes (like Ol Doinyo Lengai in Tanzania) to trench/subduction volcanoes (like Etna, Vesuvius, Krakatoa, Fujiyama, the Andes, and the North American Cascades).  Her research puts her in position as one of the world's foremost and most knowledgeable experts on volcanic offgassing, and what it means for our understanding of what is going on inside the Earth's mantle.

In her book, she not only references currently-active volcanoes, but prehistoric eruptions -- and one of those she discusses is the astonishingly huge Siberian Traps.  

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons OlgaChuma Ольга Чумаченко, Плато Путорана-3, CC BY-SA 3.0]

This eruption, of a type known as a large igneous province or flood basalt, happened 252 million years ago, at the end of the Permian Period.  Flood basalt eruptions occur when something rifts the crust of the Earth and deep-source, extremely hot basaltic (low silica content) lava flows out.  This lava is incredibly fluid, and fills up valleys like water fills a bowl.  In the case of Siberia, it was a quantity that beggars belief; current estimates stand at around four million cubic kilometers of lava.  The disaster this caused was amplified by the fact that prior to the eruption, the Earth had had a long period of warm, wet climates pretty much worldwide, facilitating the growth of widespread swamps and rainforests.  The age when this occurred is called the Carboniferous Period, so named because all that dead compressed plant matter locked up gigantic quantities of atmospheric carbon, forming enormous seams of coal.

When the Siberian Traps erupted, the lava ripped its way through those massive coal deposits, and the carbon they contained was suddenly returned to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.  Mather writes:

Estimates of total carbon dioxide emissions over the million-year-scale lifetimes of these basaltic floods are in the region of tens to hundreds of trillion tonnes...  Estimates of varying emission rates over the very long lifetimes of these provinces are harder to make than the totals, but one recent study put the maximum emission rate during the Siberian Traps at around eighteen billion tonnes per year.

The result was widespread disruption of the climate, global marine anoxia, and the largest mass extinction ever -- the Permian-Triassic Extinction, which wiped out on the order of ninety percent of life on Earth.

The kicker comes in the very next paragraph, when Mather tells us that the rate of carbon dioxide production from the most massively devastating volcanic eruption on record, the rock from which covers an area of seven million square kilometers, is half the rate our current fossil fuel use is currently churning out carbon dioxide.

I don't exaggerate when I say I had to read that passage three times before I was convinced I'd understood her correctly.

I've all too frequently heard laypeople give a sneering chuckle at the climatologists, saying stuff like, "What a lot of bullshit.  One volcanic eruption emits more carbon dioxide than all the cars on Earth do."  They rarely cite a source, and when they do it's from something like the fossil-fuel-industry-funded Heartland Institute, but -- because this opinion is a great excuse for continuing to do stuff the same way we always have -- they almost never get challenged on it.

It's astonishing how easy it is to accept a false viewpoint when it gives you a comforting reason not to do anything inconvenient to your lifestyle.

But here's the straight scoop from Tamsin Mather, who (allow me to reiterate) is a volcanologist who specializes in analysis of volcanic offgassing:

Despite the wide error bars in our estimates of the global rate of volcanic carbon degassing, what we can know is that these natural emissions pale into insignificance compared to what humans produce.  In 2019, human fossil-fuel burning released over 35 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere.  This is seventy times more than even our most generous current estimates of global magmatic carbon degassing.  In 2022, the aviation industry alone emitted 800 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, eclipsing estimates of that from our planet's background tectonism before even considering other sectors of human industry.  We cannot look to Earth's volcanism today to reassure ourselves that our rate of carbon emission might not be too much of a change in terms of our planet's natural cycles.  Powerful as the forces of tectonics that daily drive the slow creep of plate movement and volcanic activity across the globe are, the human race has currently surpassed them in terms of its carbon dioxide flux to the atmosphere.  It is apposite to reflect upon the level of responsibility that should appropriately come with the level of power attained by our species that, by this carbon metric, overwhelms all Earth's volcanoes.

Despite this, we have a candidate for president here in the United States -- I doubt I need to tell you which one -- who has stated he wants to discontinue investment in renewable energy and withdraw from the Paris Accords, and frequently says "Drill baby drill, and frack frack frack!" to cheering crowds.

Anyhow, I'm sorry to post alarming stuff, but perhaps now isn't such a bad time after all.  We have the chance to make a difference not only by our actions and choices, but in the voting booth.  It put me in mind of a conversation that occurs in my novel In the Midst of Lions, which seems a fitting way to end this post:

Mary Hansard's face registered near panic.  "It's not just here.  It’s everything we know.  Soon it’ll all be gone, and if we don’t find a way out, us with it.  We've got to do something, now.”

Soren glanced at Dr. Quaice.  “Okay, this is scaring the shit out of me.”

Mary tightened her grip on Soren’s sleeve.  “Good.  Good.  You should be scared.  Scared people act.” She hitched a sob.  “Complacent people die.”

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Wrongness

I get a lot of negative comments.

It comes with the territory, I suppose, and I knew when I started writing this blog fourteen years ago that I would have to develop a thick skin.  Given the subject matter, there's hardly a post I do that won't piss someone off.  Here's a sampling of comments, and a brief description of the topic that elicited them:

• You are either ignorant or just stupid.  I'm putting my bet on the latter.  (after a post on machines that are supposed to "alkalinize" water to make it more healthful)
• Narrow-minded people like you are the worst problem this society faces.  (after a post on "crystal healing")
• I am honestly offended by what you wrote.  (after a post on alternative medicine)
• I can't say I warm to your tone.  (after a post on ghost hunting)
• That is the most ignorant thing I have ever read.  I could feel my IQ dropping as I read it.  (after a post in which I made a statement indicating that I think recent climate change is anthropogenic in origin)
• I hate smug dilettantes like you.  (after a post on mysticism vs. rationalism)
• You are a worthless wanker, and I hope you rot in hell.  (from a young-earth creationist)

My skin isn't thick enough that some of these don't sting.  For example, the one that called me a "smug dilettante" has a grain of truth to it; I'm not a scientist, just a retired science teacher, and if my educational background has a flaw it's that it's a light year across and an inch deep.  Notwithstanding that in a previous century people like me were called "polymaths," not "dabblers" or "dilettantes," the commenter scored a point, whether he knew it or not.  I'm well-read, and have a decent background in a lot of things, but I'm not truly an expert in anything.

Other disagreements on this list have been resolved by discussion, which is honestly what I prefer to do.  The comments that came from the posts on alternative medicine and ghost hunting generated fruitful discussion, and understanding (if not necessarily agreement) on both sides.

Most of the time, though, I just don't engage with people who choose to use the "Comments" section (or email) as a venue for snark.  You're not going to get very far by calling me ignorant, for example.  I make a practice of not writing about subjects on which I am ignorant, so even if I make an offhand comment about something, I try to make sure that I could back it up with facts if I needed to.  (Cf. this site, apropos of the individual who thinks I am ignorant for accepting the anthropogenic nature of recent climate change.  Plus, I once had the amazing Bill McKibben give me a thumbs-up for one of my climate change posts, which counts for a great deal.)

That said, what a lot of people don't seem to recognize about me is the extent to which my understanding of the world is up for grabs.  Like anyone, I do have my biases, and my baseline assumptions -- the latter including the idea that the universe is best understood through the dual lenses of logic and evidence.

But everything else?  My attitude is, if you want to try to convince me about Bigfoot or chakras or crystals or astrology or your particular take on religion or anything else, knock yourself out.  But you'd better have the evidence on your side, because even if I am a dilettante, I have read up on the topics on which I write.

I am as prone as the next guy, though, to getting it wrong sometimes.  And I am well aware of the fact that we can slide into error without realizing it.  As journalist Kathryn Schulz said, in her phenomenal lecture "On Being Wrong" (which you should all take fifteen minutes and watch as soon as you're done reading this):

How does it feel to be wrong?  Dreadful, thumbs down, embarrassing.  Those are great answers.  But they're answers to a different question.  (Those are) the answers to the question, "How does it feel to realize you're wrong?"  Realizing you're wrong can feel like all of that, and a lot of other things.  It can be devastating.  It can be revelatory.  It can actually be quite funny...  But just being wrong?  It doesn't feel like anything...  We're already wrong, we're already in trouble, but we still feel like we're on solid ground.  So I should actually correct something I said a moment ago: it does feel like something to be wrong.  It feels like being right.

To those who are provoked, even pissed off by what I write: good.  We never discover our errors -- and I'm very much including myself in this assessment -- without being knocked askew once in a while.  Let yourself be challenged without having a knee-jerk kick in response, and you have my word that I'll do the same.  And while I don't like having my erroneous thinking uncovered any more than anyone else, I will take a deep breath and admit it when I screw up.  I've published retractions in Skeptophilia more than once, which has been a profoundly humbling but entirely necessary experience.

So keep those cards and letters coming.  Even the negative ones.  I'm not going to promise you I'll change my mind on every topic I'm challenged on, but I do promise that I'll consider what you've said.

On the other hand, calling me a "worthless wanker" didn't accomplish much but making me choke-snort a mouthful of coffee all over my computer.  So I suppose that the commenter even got his revenge there, if only in a small way.

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Pearlin Jean

Appropriate to the day, I thought I'd tell you about an interesting (and quite cordial) exchange about ghosts I got into with a loyal reader of Skeptophilia.

He's an open-minded sort but definitely more likely than I am to credit tales of the paranormal, especially those having to do with hauntings.  We talked a little about some of the better-known ghostly claims, and he said, "The thing is, how could all of those stories be false?  Okay, I'm willing to admit that a lot of them are.  Maybe most.  But what you're telling me is that of all the thousands of allegedly-true ghost stories out there, one hundred percent of them are fabrications.  That seems to me to take more faith than a belief in ghosts does."

My answer was first to correct a misapprehension; I don't disbelieve all those claims.  As he points out, at least for some of them, we don't have hard evidence that they are hoaxes, because there's no hard evidence of any kind.  My position is that none of the ones I've seen meet the minimum standard that science demands.

And that's it.  If your grandmother's sister's best friend's husband's second cousin saw a ghost with her own eyes, that's all well and good.  It might be true.  It might be that she made it up, or that she was tricked by a fault in human perception (heaven knows, there are enough of those), or that whatever it was she saw has a perfectly natural, non-ghostly explanation.  That's where we have to leave it: we don't know.

But.

As skeptics, the default belief is that what you see around you has a natural scientific cause.  When something goes bump in the night, and you can't figure out what that bump was, you fall back on "well, it must have been an animal or a tree branch hitting the roof or something like that."  You don't jump to it being the ghost of the old lady who owned this house in 1850 and died after falling down the stairs unless you have some pretty damn good evidence.

There's one other issue that confounds our ability to accept tales of hauntings, and that's the unfortunate talent humans have for embellishment.  Hey, I'm a novelist, and I know all about that; there's no story that can't be made better by adding new twists and turns and details after the fact.  What this does, though, is to obscure any facts that the story does contain, and leave you with no real knowledge of where the truth ends and fiction begins.

One hallmark of a story like this -- that may have started out with bare-bones truth, but grew by accretion thereafter -- is when there are several versions of the story.  Take, for example, the Scottish legend of Pearlin Jean, in which the main characters were very real.

The central figure of the story is Robert Stewart (or Steuart) (1643-1707), 1st Baronet of Allanbank (Berwickshire).  Stewart was a nobly-connected merchant in Leith, and like a lot of rich folk of the period, when he was a young man his parents sent him to do a tour of continental Europe as part of his education.  He spent some time in Rome, but apparently while in France did another thing that young men often do, which was to have a torrid affair, in this case with a young woman named Jean (or Jeanne).

The liaison was never meant to be permanent, at least not by Stewart, and he made it clear he intended to return to Scotland to take his place in the upper crust.  But after that, things kind of went awry.

If you've read any traditional ghost stories, you can probably predict what happened next -- Jean dies, and Stewart ends up being plagued by her vengeful ghost.  But the way this happens depends on which version you read.  Here are three I found:

• Jean was a nun in the Sisters of Charity of Paris, and in fooling around with Robert had broken her vow of chastity.  She tried to follow him home but he rebuffed her, and while trying to get aboard his carriage as he was leaving Paris fell underneath and was killed when the wheel hit her in the head.  Her dying words were, "I'll be in Scotland afore ye!", perhaps after taking the low road to Loch Lomond.

• Robert left Jean in France (in this version very much alive) and made it back to Scotland, but Jean followed him, as jilted lovers in ghost stories are wont to do.  Her death in a carriage accident happened on Robert's home estate of Allanbank in Scotland.

• Jean not only followed him back to Scotland, but brought with her the baby she'd borne after their illicit hanky-panky.  Stewart killed the child, and distraught, Jean threw herself beneath the wheel of the carriage.

Afterward, the ghost -- nicknamed "Pearlin Jean" because of the dress of gray pearlin lace she wore, which in one version of the tale had been given to her by Robert Stewart -- followed her lover around, generally making his life miserable by appearing at inopportune times (although is there an opportune time for the ghost of your dead mistress to show up?), slamming doors and running up and down the staircase.  On one occasion -- at least in one iteration of the story -- Stewart got the crap scared out of him after returning home from a drive, and when he was ready to climb out of the carriage was stopped cold by an apparition of a woman in a lace dress with blood all over her face.  He was frozen in place until one of his servants came out to see what was amiss and the ghost disappeared.

Creepy tale, no doubt about that.  But what part of it is true?

Alleged ghost photograph, most likely a double exposure (1899)  [Image is in the Public Domain]

Robert Stewart was a real person, that's certain enough.  As far as Pearlin Jean -- who knows?  I find it a little suspicious that Stewart is known to have married twice, and both of his wives were named Jean.  (Both of them were solidly Scottish, however, not French.)  His first marriage was to Jean Gilmour, daughter of John Gilmour of Craigmillar, and his second to Jean Cockburn, daughter of Alexander Cockburn of Langton.

But who knows?  Maybe the guy just had a thing for women named Jean.  "Hey, babe, how about a tumble?... *pauses*  Wait a minute, is your name Jean?  Oh, okay, then, let's have at it."

On the other hand, it's entirely possible that when people remembered Stewart's relationships with two (real) women named Jean, adding a third just sort of happened.

The difficulty here is that some parts of the legend are true, and of the remainder, there might be bits of it that are as well -- but which bits?  Needless to say, I'm not buying the ghostly business, and even with the tragic but non-supernatural parts -- a rich young man's dalliance with a poor and vulnerable young woman, that led to her death -- there are too many different versions to know exactly what did happen and what were later embellishments or outright fabrications.

And the problem is, a great many ghost stories are like this.  Multiple versions, and no real scientifically admissible evidence.  So my friend's comment that some of them could be true is a possibility, but figuring out after the fact which ones is very often an impossibility.

This is why with modern claims of the paranormal, I'm very much of the opinion that any reasonably coherent ones deserve exploration when they happen, rather than waiting until afterward and the inevitable human tendency toward embellishment (and outright misremembering) occurs.  I fully support groups like the excellent Society for Psychical Research -- they're committed to investigating claims from the standpoint of scientific evidence, and are unhesitating in calling a hoax a hoax.

So I'm open to being convinced.  Yes, it might take a good bit of convincing, but as with just about everything, if presented with adequate evidence I'll have no option but to accept that my default position -- that there is a natural, non-paranormal explanation -- was wrong.

But thus far, Pearlin Jean and the hundreds of other stories like it just aren't doing it for me.  Sorry if that diminishes the frisson of the season, but that's the way I see it.  On the other hand, if when you're out trick-or-treating tonight, you see the apparition of a bloody-faced woman dressed in tattered gray lace step out of the shadows -- well, good luck to you, too.

  

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