Not easy being green

After recent posts dealing with politics, culture, the hazards of AI, and important scientific discoveries, I'm sure what you're all thinking is: yes, Gordon, but what about sightings of the mysterious Green Elf Chimp of Florida?

All I can say is that I'm sorry for the oversight, and will do my best to rectify the situation today.  I found out about the Green Elf Chimp from a loyal reader of Skeptophilia who was responding to my recent comment that the world has gotten so surreal lately that I'm beginning to wonder if the aliens who are running the simulation we're all trapped in have gotten bored and/or stoned, and now they're just fucking with us.  The reader sent me an email with a link and a message that said, "Yeah, there's no doubt about it.  The aliens are just throwing weird shit at us to see how long it takes us to stand up, flip the table, and say, 'That's it.  I'm done.'"

The link was to the website of one Karl Shuker, zoologist (of the crypto as well as the ordinary variety), who tells us about sightings of a strange cryptid near the town of New Port Richey, north of Tampa on Florida's west coast.  Here's one account:

"There's a terrible smell around here. Can't you smell it?" the girl complained...  As the others took deep breaths "an animal about the size of a large chimpanzee" sprang onto the hood of the car.

"Then we panicked!" the driver later told investigator Joan Whritenour.  "The thing looked like a big chimp, but it was glowing greenish in color, with glowing green eyes.  I started the motor and the thing jumped off and ran back into the woods. We tore like blazes back to the dance we were supposed to be attending."

A police officer from New Port Richey later visited the site and found a sticky green substance which remains unidentified.

One thing I've never understood is why cryptids and aliens and whatnot are so often described as having "glowing eyes."  And how many horror movies have you seen where evil creatures' eyes suddenly start emitting light, usually green or red?  Now, reflective eyes, sure; anyone who's ever caught a deer or raccoon in their car headlights at night knows that a lot of animals, especially nocturnal ones, have reflective eyes.  This is because of a structure called the tapetum lucidum, a reflective membrane behind the retina.  For diurnal animals (like ourselves), we're usually exposed to more light than we need; so if a lot of it passes right through the retina and gets passively absorbed by the tissue behind it, it's not really a problem.  But for nocturnal animals, they need every photon they can get.  That's why many of them have evolved a tapetum, which reflects the light back through the retina and gives the light receptors therein a second chance to catch it.

Glowing eyes, though?  What do they think, that there are little guys inside there with flashlights, shining them out through the pupils?

To Shuker's credit, he does point this out, although he still seems to give the whole incident a lot more credence than I would.

He also (rightly) wonders if it may have been an actual chimp, i.e., not a strange paranormal alien chimp or whatever.  But this doesn't explain why the chimp was green, which is definitely not a standard-issue color for chimps, and why the chimp itself was glowing.  He then speculated that perhaps the chimp was an escapee from a zoo that had gone for a swim in water containing bioluminescent algae, simultaneously explaining (1) green, (2) glowing, and (3) smelling bad.

Fig. 1: A non-green, non-glowing, non-elf chimp, for reference purposes. [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Chi King, Chimpanzee (13968481823), CC BY 2.0]

However, Shuker also goes on to suggest that the Green Elf Chimp might not itself be a separate species of cryptid, but a juvenile Florida Skunk Ape.  Which, I have to admit, had not occurred to me.  Maybe they fluoresce when they're juveniles and not when they're adults, which gives new meaning to the phrase "he has a youthful glow."

Of course, there's always the possibility that the whole account could be explained by the people reporting it having ingested a few controlled substances themselves.

Anyhow, that's the news from the world of cryptozoology.  As luck would have it, some dear friends of mine live in New Port Richey, so I'll definitely have them keep their eyes out.  They are also the keepers of varying numbers of absolutely enormous dogs (they have a soft spot for Great Danes and Mastiffs), who I'm sure would also notify the human inhabitants if a smelly green glowing chimp showed up in the back yard.

I'll keep you posted.

On the other hand, if this is all because of some stoned aliens twiddling the knobs on the simulation to try and see what they can get the humans to fall for -- enough, already.  I'm having sufficient difficulty accepting the fact that the same people who falsely claimed for eight years that an African immigrant was running the country now have zero problem with an actual African immigrant running the country, and a guy who admitted that a worm had eaten his brain was nominated to oversee the Department of Health and Human Services, and a guy so catastrophically dumb that he couldn't find the Bahamas on a map if there were arrows printed on it with the caption "HEY, STUPID, THE BAHAMAS ARE RIGHT HERE" was appointed Ambassador to the Bahamas.  We get it, aliens, you win.  Humans are idiots.

No Green Elf Chimps required.

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A lens on the past

We have an unfortunate tendency to idealize the past.

Well, unfortunate is probably the wrong word.  I don't guess it does any real harm, and in fiction it can be quite entertaining.  Unrealistic is probably a better choice.  Except for the (very) select privileged few, our ancestors' lives were -- to quote Thomas Hobbes -- "solitary, nasty, poor, brutish, and short."

This idealization creates a picture in our minds that is almost certainly false.  Consider, for example, Jean Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear series, which focuses on the meeting between some civilized, beautiful Cro-Magnon folks and some violent, nasty Neanderthals.  Reminiscent of Tolkien's Orcs and Elves, the Neanderthals all have names like Thok and Ugg and Glop, and the Cro-Magnons mellifluous names like Sondamar and Alidor.  (Before you start yelling at me, yes, I made those up because I don't own the book any more and I don't feel like looking it up.  But my point stands.)

But it's not just the prehistorics.  Contrast two different tales of medieval monastic life -- Ellis Peters's Brother Cadfael series and Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose.  Don't get me wrong, I love Brother Cadfael; his logic, compassion, and love for botany are all endearing, and Peters was a great mystery writer.  But the reality of life in western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was undoubtedly closer to Eco's harsh, unwashed, rough-shod reality, with its starving peasants and superstitions and religious fanaticism, than it was to Peters's genteel knights and tradesmen and monks.

Like I said, I don't really object to fictional portrayals, even with their inevitable inaccuracies.  I've written a few stories set in the past myself -- the English Midlands in the nineteenth century (Adam's Fall), pre-Civil-War Louisiana (The Communion of Shadows), eleventh century Iceland (Kári the Lucky), and Britain during the fourteenth century Black Death (We All Fall Down).  I hope I've skirted the line between realism and romanticism deftly enough to make it believable without being too dark and depressing.

But the fact remains that our ancestors didn't have it easy.  That we're here is a tribute to their tenacity, strength, and determination.  Whenever I consider archaeological finds, I'm always struck by how cushy a lot of us have it now, with our indoor plumbing and heat in the winter and electric appliances and modern medicine, all of which our forebears somehow survived -- at least for a while -- without.

The reason this comes up is a study out of the University of Oxford that was published last week in the journal Antiquity, describing a rather horrific archaeological discovery in Merrie Old England.  The remains of at least 37 people were found near Charterhouse Warren, Somerset, dating to the Early Bronze Age (preliminary dating puts them at around 2000 B.C.E.) that show signs not only of violent death -- but the bodies were butchered and eaten afterwards, and the remains thrown down a fifteen-meter-deep shaft.

"We actually find more evidence for injuries to skeletons dating to the Neolithic period in Britain than the Early Bronze Age, so Charterhouse Warren stands out as something very unusual," said Rick Schulting, who was the study's lead author.  "It paints a considerably darker picture of the period than many would have expected."

[Image credit: Schulting et al., Antiquity]

And it doesn't appear to be a case of desperation, where starving people resorted to cannibalism because they had no other options.  The same site yielded up plentiful cattle bones, so it's apparent the Bronze Age residents of Charterhouse Warren weren't hurting for chow.

Any explanation of this behavior is, of course, pure speculation, but one thought is that the victors ate their defeated enemies as a way either of dehumanizing them, or perhaps from some sort of belief that doing so would allow any courage or spirit the enemies had to pass into them.

"Charterhouse Warren is one of those rare archaeological sites that challenges the way we think about the past," Schulting said.  "It is a stark reminder that people in prehistory could match more recent atrocities and shines a light on a dark side of human behavior.  That it is unlikely to have been a one-off event makes it even more important that its story is told."

It certainly puts a clearer and harsher light on what life in the past was actually like.  "If people think of the past as something peaceful and idealized," said archaeologist Ludvig Papmehl-Dufay, of Kalmar University, who was not involved in the current study, "that needs to be revised."

In any case, it's probably for the best that we do see our history through softer lenses.  The rigors that 95% of humanity endured back then, that (fortunately) far fewer have to endure now, were seriously depressing stuff.  And I suppose it's encouraging, really; for all the horrific stories in the news, we have come a long way as a species.  Not that we don't still have a long way to go.  But when asked when I would choose to live if I had a time machine that could take me into the past, my answer is always "right here and right now."

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Eye of the storm

Ever heard of Wolf-Rayet stars?  They deserve more notice than they get, as one of the most violently energetic phenomena in the universe.  The fact that the name is not in common parlance -- when even the most scientifically-uninterested layperson has heard of supernovae and quasars and black holes -- is probably due to a combination of (1) their rarity, and (2) the fact that the ones that are visible to the naked eye are pretty unimpressive-looking at first glance.  Gamma Velorum and Theta Muscae, both of which are in the Southern Hemisphere and never visible where I live in upstate New York, are Wolf-Rayet stars that look completely ordinary until you check out their light spectra and find out that there's something really extraordinary going on.

The first thing that becomes apparent is that they are hot.  I mean, even by stellar standards.  Wolf-Rayet stars have a surface temperature between 30,000 K and an almost unimaginable 210,000 K.  (By comparison, the Sun's surface is about 5,700 K.)  These temperatures fuel an enormously strong stellar wind, which blows away almost all of the lightweight hydrogen in the outer layers, and also ionizes most of what is left -- predominantly oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon.  They're at the head of the list of potential gamma-ray bursters -- stars that undergo sudden collapse followed by a colossal explosion, resulting in a blast of gamma rays collimated into narrow beams along the star's rotational axis.  So having a Wolf-Rayet star's rotational axis pointed toward your planet would be like staring down the barrel of a loaded gun.

They're also beautiful.  At least from a distance.  The reason all this comes up is because of a paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society about one that's been called "a stellar peacock" -- the star Apep, in the constellation Norma.  This Wolf-Rayet star has blown carbon-laden dust from its surface, which its high rotational speed swept into a pinwheel.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons ESO/Callingham et al, The triple star system 2XMM J160050.7–514245 (Apep), CC BY 4.0]

The name Apep comes from Egyptian mythology -- Apep was the monstrous serpent who was the enemy of the god Ra.  Astronomer Joseph Callingham, one of the first to study Apep, thought the name was apt -- in his words it was "a star embattled within a dragon's coils."

All poetic license aside, the violent imagery is spot-on.  Wolf-Rayet stars eventually self-destruct, becoming black holes, but not until basically destroying anything unfortunate enough to be nearby.  So the bright spot at the center of Apep is the eye of a cosmic-scale storm.

The research I referenced, by a team led by University of Sydney student Yinuo Han, uses observational data from the Very Large Telescope in Chile to understand what is creating the spiral plumes.  The detail is phenomenal; in an interview with Science Daily, Han said, "The magnification required to produce the imagery was like seeing a chickpea on a table fifty kilometers away."

"[Wolf-Rayet stars] are ticking time bombs," said study co-author Peter Tuthill.  "As well as exhibiting all the usual extreme behavior of Wolf-Rayets, Apep's main star looks to be rapidly rotating.  This means it could have all the ingredients to detonate a long gamma-ray burst when it goes supernova."

It's hard to say anything about this group of stars without lapsing into superlatives.  "The speeds of the stellar winds produced are just mind-blowing," Han said.  "They are spinning off the stars at about twelve million kilometers an hour.  That's one percent the speed of light."

Fortunately for us, Apep is a safe 6,600 light years away, so it poses no danger to us.  If one was a lot nearer -- within 25 or so light years' distance -- it would be catastrophic.  The radiation bombardment could strip away the ozone layer, leaving the Earth's surface subject to massive irradiation.  There's decent evidence that some of the Earth's mass extinctions may have been caused by nearby supernovae (not necessarily Wolf-Rayets).  But to put your mind at ease, there aren't any supernovae candidates of any sort within what is rather terrifyingly called "the kill zone."

So that's a look at one of the most dangerous and beautiful phenomena in the universe.  I'm glad we're getting to see it, and find out a little bit about what makes it tick.

From a safe distance.

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*ding* You've got mail!

It's inevitable that as Skeptophilia has grown in popularity, it's also attracted some attention of the less-positive sort.

Let me say up front that I appreciate most of the comments I get, even the ones that disagree with me.  As I pointed out to one person who took exception to something I posted -- and then apologized for appearing negative -- I wouldn't be much of a skeptic if I didn't admit it when I was wrong, had incomplete information, or was simply ignorant about a topic, so there was no need to apologize for taking me to task for it.  (And in point of fact, after my discussion with the person in question, I decided I was far enough off base that I went back and deleted the post.)

But all you have to do is look at the comments section of pretty much any example of online media to find out that there's a whole other side of this phenomenon.

So for your entertainment, today I'd like to present to you a sampling of some recent-ish comments I've gotten on posts, and a short response to each from me.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons RRZEicons, Mailbox, CC BY-SA 3.0]

1.  After a post in which I scoffed at the idea that some lady in Romania had somehow taken a photograph of her dead grandma in hell:

You're laughing now, but you won't be once you're dead yourself and join the damned in hell.

Well, you're right insofar as I won't be laughing after I'm dead.  If dead people laughed, it would give a whole different vibe to your typical funeral.  (On the other hand, it'd still be better than what happened at Mr. Redpath's poor Grandmama's funeral in the Doctor Who episode "The Unquiet Dead.")  As far as where my eternal soul -- presuming I actually have one -- will end up once I've shuffled off this mortal coil, there are a lot of other options various religions have dreamed up besides the Christian heaven and hell, so maybe there'll be choices.  As I've mentioned before, my personal favorite is Valhalla.  This might necessitate my having a Viking funeral, which I think would be kind of cool, but I'm not sure my wife will go for it.

2.  After a post on alternative medicine:

I hate closed-minded idiots like you.  I hope Big Pharma is paying you well.

I wish Big Pharma was paying me at all.  They're way behind on sending out their Shill Checks, and I'm hoping they get their asses in gear soon because at the moment I'm making one-eighth of bugger-all as a novelist.

3.  A response to a post, I've forgotten which, because it could be pretty much any of them:

You sure do swear a lot.

Fuckin' right I do.  My mom, who was a complete prude, tried her best to cure me of it, saying stuff like "People use bad words only if their vocabulary is so poor they don't know any appropriate ones."  With the wisdom of age, I've come to the conclusion that there's nothing whatsoever wrong with my vocabulary, and if an off-color word is the right one for the occasion, I'm damn well going to use it.  In any case, if the occasional swear word makes your eyes cross, you're not going to have much fun here at Skeptophilia.

4.  In response to a post I did about musical taste:

The fact that you sing the praises of Ralph Vaughan Williams tells me everything I need to know about the depth of your knowledge of classical music.  He's the favorite composer of shallow pseudo-intellectuals.

Opinion (n.) /əˈpɪn·yən/ -- a judgment about something or someone based upon personal experience and belief rather than universal or provable facts.

5.  After one of my recent posts criticizing Donald Trump -- I forget which, because once again, there are a bunch to choose from:

Trump is the president.  He won, and you libtards better get used to it.

I know he won, because it's why I had to renew my Xanax prescription last week.  As far as getting used to it -- I think everyone in this country is going to have to get used to a lot of things, including higher food prices, internment camps and deportations, cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, elimination of VA health care benefits, loss of access to vaccines, and amoral plutocrats in charge of everything.  To name a few.

But by all means, don't let me stop you from celebrating while you've still got reason to.

6.  After a post about an ultra-Christian preacher who thinks that masturbation summons "sex demons:"

I don't get on social media to read filth like this.

Then... um... don't read it?  No one's forcing you to read anything.  This reminds me of the old story about the woman who called the police because she could see out of her back window that some teenage boys were skinnydipping in the nearby river.  So the police came, and (showing admirable restraint) told the boys to go swim somewhere else.  Well, an hour later, the police got a second call from her with the same complaint.

The police said, "So, you can still see the boys through your window?"

And the woman said, "No, but I can if I climb up on my roof and look through my binoculars."

7.  After a post about hoaxes and conspiracies in which I mentioned that my all-time favorite book was Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum:

Ooh, well, aren't you just the most sophisticated scholar in the room.  Reading Eco is the modern equivalent of pretending you actually enjoy James Joyce.

Well, given that I'm the only person in the room at the moment, I'm the most sophisticated scholar here kind of by default.  The only other vaguely sentient being in my office is my puppy Jethro, who is a lovely little dog but (and I mean this in the kindest possible way) has the IQ of a peach pit.  But leaving that aside, allow me to correct an apparent misapprehension on your part.  I hate posturing and conceit as much as you seem to, and if I didn't like Foucault's Pendulum I certainly wouldn't have felt inclined to say I did out of some misguided sense that it would impress people.  And as far as your not liking Eco, I'll simply refer you to the definition of "opinion" I posted earlier.

Anyhow, those are a few selections from the mailbag.  Following Irish writer Brendan Behan's observation that "there's no such thing as bad publicity," I'd say, keep those cards and letters comin'.  I certainly can't stop people from responding negatively to what I post, and then indignantly informing me of the fact, but I can then save up their responses for a subsequent post.

Consider yourself forewarned.

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Dangerous reflection

Last week I ran across an article in the journal Science about our capacity for creating "mirror life," and the risks thereof.  I considered addressing the topic here, but after some thought concluded that the human race has more pressing things to worry about at the moment, such as climate change, global pandemics, terrorism, environmental collapse, and Donald Trump opening the Seventh Seal of the Apocalypse because he thought it was a can of Pepsi, so I decided against it.

Since then I've been sent the article (or various summaries and commentaries) four times, along with the questions "can you tell me more about this?" and "should I be freaking out right now?"  So I guess there's enough interest (and concern) over this that it's worth a post.

The answer to the second question, at least, is "No, not yet;" and as for the first, here goes.

The issue has to do with a property of a great many organic molecules called chirality.  Chirality is like the handedness of a pair of gloves; no matter how you flip or turn a left-handed glove, it's not going to fit on your right hand.  It's made of the same parts, but put together in such a way that it can't be rotated or translated to coincide with its opposite.  Pairs of molecules like that are called enantiomers or optical isomers (the latter because crystals made of them rotate polarized light in opposite directions).

A left-handed and right-handed enantiomer of an amino acid [Image is the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]

The key point here is that on Earth, living things generally can only synthesize and metabolize one form of chiral molecules; our amino acids are all left-handed, while our sugars (including the ones in the backbones of DNA and RNA) are right-handed.  Given a diet of food made of right-handed amino acids and left-handed sugars, we'd probably not notice a difference in taste or texture -- but since our enzymes are all evolved to deal with a particular handedness, the food wouldn't be metabolizable.

In short, we'd starve to death.

The article in Science deals with the fact that biochemists have been working to find out if it's possible to create "mirror life" -- organisms constructed of molecules with the opposite handedness as our own.  And this is what has some people concerned.  The authors write:

Driven by curiosity and plausible applications, some researchers had begun work toward creating lifeforms composed entirely of mirror-image biological molecules.  Such mirror organisms would constitute a radical departure from known life, and their creation warrants careful consideration.  The capability to create mirror life is likely at least a decade away and would require large investments and major technical advances; we thus have an opportunity to consider and preempt risks before they are realized.  Here, we draw on an in-depth analysis of current technical barriers, how they might be eroded by technological progress, and what we deem to be unprecedented and largely overlooked risks.  We call for broader discussion among the global research community, policy-makers, research funders, industry, civil society, and the public to chart an appropriate path forward.

The main concern is that if these mirror organisms were somehow to escape from the lab, we wouldn't have much of a way to fight back.  Both antibodies and antibiotics are chiral as well, and likely wouldn't recognize and bind to organisms whose cell surfaces were made of molecules with the opposite handedness.  Any of these synthetic organisms that did turn out to be pathogenic would require a whole different suite of medications, and our own bodily defenses would likely be relatively useless against them.

But.

Here's the thing.  If the scientists do succeed in creating mirror life, and it does escape, the most likely result would be... nothing.  Mirror life would itself need food, and of the proper handedness for its own enzymes; and given that everything in the environment has the same left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars that we do, these synthetic life forms would have nothing to eat.  The only possible problem would be if the scientists created a mirror autotroph -- something capable of synthesizing its own nutrients, like cyanobacteria, algae, or plants.  Then, it could be a problem, from the standpoint that like exotic invasives, it would have no natural predators and might outcompete other organisms in its environment.

The other concern, though, is the "life finds a way" thing.  A mutation allowing one of these synthetic organisms to metabolize proteins or sugars of the opposite handedness from their own (or both of them) would be at a distinct advantage; if we created one of those, and it escaped, we might well be fucked.  The thing is, from what we know of biochemistry, that's an extremely rare adaptation.  I only know of one organism -- a rather obscure plant pathogen called Burkholderia caryophyllii -- that has an enzyme called D-threo-aldose 1-dehydrogenase that allows it to oxidize left-handed glucose.  

But unless you're a carnation, Burkholderia isn't a threat.

So that's an awful lot of ifs.  Thus my response that you don't have anything pressing to worry about from this research.

Now, mind you, I'm all for being careful, and I mean no criticisms of the scientists who are advising cautious consideration.  We have a rather abysmal track record of launching into stuff without thinking about the consequences.  But as far as whether we ordinary laypeople need to be worried about some synthetic mirror-image pathogen attacking next Tuesday and reducing us all to little quivering blobs of goo, I'd say no.

On the other hand, I'm the guy who told his AP Biology students in January of 1997 that "adult tissue cloning is at least ten years away," exactly one month before the announcement about Dolly the Sheep.  So maybe any predictions I make should be taken with a grain of salt.

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A linguistic labyrinth

It's funny the rabbit holes fiction writers get dragged down sometimes.

This latest one occurred because of two things that happened kind of at the same time.  First, I was chatting with a friend about one of my books, a fall-of-civilization novel called In the Midst of Lions that in the current national and global situation is seeming to cut a little close to the bone.  In the story, one of the characters is a linguist who saw what was coming, and wrote a conlang -- a constructed (invented) language -- so he could communicate with people he trusted without it being decipherable by enemies.

My friend asked how I managed to develop the conlang, which is called Kalila, and what process I'd gone through to make it sound like a real language.

Following in the footsteps of the Star Trek folks with Klingon and J. R. R. Tolkien with Quenya and Sindarin (two of the languages of the Elves) was not an easy task.  My MA is in linguistics (yes, I know, I spent my career teaching biology; it's a long story) so I know a good bit about language structure, and I wanted to make the language different enough from the familiar Indo-European languages to seem (1) an authentic language, not just a word-for-word substitution, and (2) something a smart linguist would think up.  Unfortunately, my specialty is Indo-European languages, specifically Scandinavian languages.  (My wife gives me grief about having studied Old Norse.  My response is that if the Vikings ever take over the shipping industry, I'm gonna have the last laugh.)

A sample of Tolkien's lovely Quenya script [Image is in the Public Domain]

So I started out with a pair of blinders on.  There are a lot of rules specific to Indo-European languages that we tend to take for granted, which was exactly what I didn't want to do with my conlang.  But in order to identify those, you have to somehow lift yourself out of your own linguistic box -- which is awfully hard to do.

The second thing, though, was that shortly after chatting about my conlang with my friend, I stumbled on a question on Quora that asked, "What is the hardest language to learn to speak fluently?"  By "hardest" most people assumed "for speakers of English," which went right to what I'd been discussing earlier -- finding out what would seem odd/counterintuitive (and therefore difficult) for English speakers.

Well, between the conversation and the post on Quora, I was led directly into an online research labyrinth, literally for hours.

One respondent to the hardest-language-question said his choice would be the Northwest Caucasian languages of Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia -- a group made up of Abaza, Abkhaz, Adyghe, Kabardian, and Ubykh -- the last-mentioned of which became extinct in 1992 when the last native speaker died of old age.  These languages form an isolate family, related to each other but of uncertain (and undoubtedly distant) relationship to other languages.

So naturally, I had to find out what's weird about them.  Here's what I learned.

Let's start out with the fact that they only have two vowels, but as many as 84 consonants depending on exactly how finely you want to break them up based on the articulation.  They use SOV (subject-object-verb) word order, plopping the verb at the end of the sentence, but that's hardly unique; Latin does that, giving rise to the old quip that by the time a Roman got to the verb in his sentence, his listeners had forgotten who he was talking about.

But in the parlance of the infomercial, "Wait, there's more!"  The Northwest Caucasian languages use agglutination -- gluing together various bits and pieces to make a more specific word -- but only for verbs.  In these languages, a verb is actually a cluster of parts called morphemes that tell you not only what the core verb is, but the place, time, manner of action, whether it's positive or negative, and even the subject's and object's person.

Then, there's the fact that they're ergative-absolutive languages.  When I hit this, I thought, "Okay, I used to know what this meant," and had to look it up.  It has to do with how the subject and object of a sentence are used.  In English (a nominative-accusative language), the subject has the same form regardless of what kind of verb follows it; likewise, the object always is the same.  So the subject of an intransitive verb like "to walk" is the same as the subject for a transitive verb like "to watch."  (We'd say, "she walked" and "she watched [someone or something];" in both cases, you use the form "she.")  The object form of "he" is always "him," regardless of any other considerations in the sentence.

Not so in the Northwest Caucasian languages, and other ergative-absolutive languages, such as Tibetan, Basque, and Mayan.  In these languages, the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive one have the same form; the subject of a transitive verb is the one with the different form.  (If English was an ergative-absolutive language, we might say "He watched her," but then it'd be "her walked.")

So there are lots of things that seem normal, obvious even, which in fact are simply arbitrary rules that we've learned are universal to English, but which are hardly universal to other languages.  It always puts me in mind of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which is that the language you speak shapes your cognitive processes.  In other words, that speakers of languages differently structured from English literally perceive the world a different way because the form of the languages force different conceptualizations of what they see.

I've gone on long enough about all this, and I haven't even scratched the surface.  There are tonal languages like Thai, where the pitch and pitch change of a syllable alter its meaning.  There are languages like Finnish and Japanese where vowel length -- literally, how long you say the vowel for -- changes the meaning of the word it's in.  There are inflected languages like Greek, where the ending of a word tells you how it's being used in the sentence (e.g., in the phrases "the cat walked," "she pet the cat," "it's the cat's bowl," "give the food to the cat," and "the dog is with the cat," the word "cat" would in each case have a different suffix).

So it was a struggle to make my conlang something that would be believable to a linguist, and I can only hope I succeeded well enough to get by.  (Or, in the context of the story, something an actual linguist would invent.)  Of course, being that it's only one small piece of the story, in the end I used something like a dozen phrases total from the language, so it was kind of a lot of work with very little obvious result.

But I figure that in any case, what I came up with has still gotta be more realistic than the Judoon "ro po fo so no do" language from Doctor Who, which I'm only throwing in here because after yesterday's post my author friend Andrew Butters commented that I can always somehow find a way to work in a Doctor Who reference regardless of the topic, and I couldn't just refuse to rise to that challenge.

So there.

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The mirror crack'd from side to side

I know there are a lot of reasons why people believe weird shit.  It's tempting to settle on the self-congratulatory solution of "Because they're dumber than I am," but I always hesitate to go there because (1) there are lots of inherent biases in our cognitive systems that you can fall for even if you're perfectly intelligent, and (2) I know all too well that I fall for those same biases myself if I'm not careful.

That said, I was sent a link by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia describing something apparently some people believe that left me saying, "Okay, that is incredibly stupid."

The link was to a story by Brent Swancer over at Mysterious Universe called "The Bizarre Tale of the Haunted Website."  Swancer's article goes into considerably more detail, but the bones of the story are as follows.

In the eighteenth century, there was a little girl whose name was "Repleh Snatas."  Repleh had a birthmark on her face that the locals said was the mark of the devil, and people started looking askance at the entire family.  The dad became convinced that his daughter was possessed, and locked her in a room full of mirrors to drive the demons out (as one does), but every morning when he'd check on her the mirrors were all cracked and she was as evil as ever.  Ultimately he killed the girl and his wife and finally himself.  The locals refused to give any of them a proper burial, but tied the three bodies to a tree all facing in different directions and let 'em rot right there.

Once again, as one does.

But Repleh was not so easily vanquished.  She disappeared into mirrors, and if you look into a mirror at night sometimes it will crack and in the fractured reflection you'll see her standing behind you, kind of like what happened to Daughter of Mine at the end of the extremely scary Doctor Who episode "Family of Blood."  Then someone started a website about Repleh, and it does weird stuff like not loading properly or actually crashing your computer.  Even if it loads it's still freaky, with collages of scary photographs of creepy children and hair-raising horror-movie-style background music.  And if you go there, you risk getting Repleh's attention, because she's still hanging around, apparently, and if she thinks you're getting too curious she might kill you.

Reading this elicited several reactions from me:

• "Repleh Snatas" has to be the least convincing fake name I've ever seen. A third-grader could figure out that it's "Satan's Helper" backwards.  What were her parents' names, Tnatsissa Snatas and Dneirftseb Snatas, or something?
• The whole girl-in-the-mirror thing is just a variation on the old kids' game of "Bloody Mary," wherein you stare into a mirror at night and say "Bloody Mary" ten times in a row, and nothing happens.
• A website not loading properly wouldn't indicate much of anything to me, because my computer does weird things like random slowdowns and page crashes pretty much all the time.  My guess is that it has nothing to do with mirrors or creepy ghost kids, but it may mean that I need a new computer.

I went to the website, which is (unsurprisingly) www.replehsnatas.com, and got the following message:

Before going to replehsnatas.com, there's one more step.  By clicking the button below you'll go through a standard security check, after which you will be redirected to Chrome store and will be given the option to install Secured Search extension.  This extension will offer you a safer web search experience by changing your default search provider.

And my response to that was, "How exactly stupid do you think I am?"  I closed the window, meaning that I never got to see the actual page, but it was better than getting whatever malware or virus this was pointing me toward, which would undoubtedly result in my computer running even worse than before.

Despite all this, apparently there are tons of people who think Repleh Snatas is real.  Over on Quora there's a whole discussion of Repleh and how you shouldn't mess around with her website because she's eeee-vil.

Even though I wasn't successful at getting into her website, I was able to find a couple of photographs that are said to be of the wicked Repleh Snatas.  (Yes, I know she supposedly lived in the eighteenth century, before the invention of photography.  Stop asking questions.)  Here's one of them:

The only problem is that this is actually a photograph of Princess Juliana of the Netherlands (who eventually became Queen Juliana).  This would be more obvious if the people who created the Repleh website and added the image hadn't photoshopped out the handwritten words "Princess Juliana" which are (I shit you not) written across the top of the original.

Here's the other one:

And this one is a still-shot of the actress Helena Avellano from her movie Moondial.

So old Repleh is kind of batting zero, here.  This has not stopped dozens of people from writing about her on True Tales of the Paranormal websites, which I will leave you to find on your own, and wherein you will read multiple accounts of the evil Repleh showing up in mirrors and generally scaring the bejeezus out of people.

As I said, I'm not usually going to point fingers at people for slipping into occasional credulity, as long as they're open to correcting themselves when they see what is actually going on.  We all do it; it's part of human nature.

On the other hand, to believe in Repleh Snatas, you have to have the IQ of a PopTart.  I've read some unbelievable paranormal claims before, but this one has to win the prize for sheer goofiness.  So my tolerance of people's foibles can only be stretched so far.

So I'm issuing a challenge to the supernatural believers out there: c'mon, folks.  Up your game.  You can do better than this.  Hell, a sufficiently motivated elementary-school student could do better than this.  The quality of your claims has really been falling off lately.  I'm expecting some better material to work with.

Get with the program, people.

  

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