Hands, skulls, and colours

In H. P. Lovecraft's terrifying and atmospheric 1927 short story "The Colour Out of Space," a meteorite strikes near a farmhouse in a rural area "west of Arkham," the fictional town in Massachusetts that is the setting of many of his stories.

The farm's owner, Nahum Gardner, and many others witness its fall; a "white noontide cloud... [a] string of explosions in the air, and [a] pillar of smoke from the valley."  Nahum, being closest, goes to investigate:

By night all Arkham had heard of the great rock that fell out of the sky and bedded itself in the ground beside the well at the Nahum Gardner place...  Nahum had come to town to tell people about the stone...  He and his wife went with three professors from Miskatonic University who hastened out the next morning to see the weird visitor from unknown stellar space, and wondered why Nahum had called it so large the day before.  It had shrunk, Nahum said as he pointed out the big brownish mound above the ripped earth and charred grass near the archaic well-sweep in his front yard; but the wise men answered that stones do not shrink.  Its heat lingered persistently, and Nahum declared it had glowed faintly in the night.  The professors tried it with a geologist's hammer and found it was oddly soft.  It was, in truth, so soft as to be almost plastic; and they gouged rather than chipped a specimen to take back to the college for testing.  They took it in an old pail borrowed from Nahum's kitchen, for even the small piece refused to grow cool...

The day after that... the professors had trooped out again in great excitement...  [T]he specimen... had faded wholly away when they put it in a glass beaker.  The beaker had gone as well, and the men talked about the strange stone's affinity for silicon.  It had acted quite unbelievably in that well-ordered laboratory; doing nothing at all and showing no occluded gases when heated on charcoal... and soon proving itself absolutely non-volatile at any producible temperature, including that of the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe.  On an anvil it appeared highly malleable, and in the dark its luminosity was very marked.  Stubbornly refusing to grow cool... upon heating before the spectroscope it displayed shining bands unlike any known colours of the normal spectrum.

Eventually, the entire meteorite -- both the samples the scientists took, and the much larger piece in Nahum Gardner's yard -- evaporate away completely.  Well, not completely, because it's Lovecraft, after all; it left behind a miasma -- dare I say, an eldritch miasma -- that proceeds to poison the well, the soil of the farm, and the entire Gardner family.  The result is the crops, domestic animals, Nahum and his wife and three children, and finally the homestead itself quite literally falling apart, crumbling into a gray dust that "the wind does not seem to affect."  At the end of the story, the narrator describes the reason he found out about the affair -- he is an engineer hired by the state of Massachusetts to scope out a proposed site for a dam and a reservoir, which would flood "the blasted, withered heath that is all that is left of the old Gardner place" and the surrounding land.  "I shall be glad to see the water come," he says.  "I hope the water will always be very deep -- but even so, I shall never drink it."

*shudder*

The story is quite different from Lovecraft's usual fare of cults and Elder Gods and idols of the Great Cthulhu and so on, and you have to wonder what inspired it.  One thing is pretty likely to be the construction of the Scituate Reservoir in Rhode Island in 1925, near his native Providence, and the much-publicized plans for the Quabbin Reservoir in Massachusetts; but I wonder if he also got the idea from a pair of wild tales that had been all over the news not long before.

The first occurred in 1916 near Bargaintown, New Jersey, where a farmer named Henry Prantl reported something very much like what Nahum Gardner saw in Lovecraft's story -- a white light streaking across the sky, followed by the boom of an impact.  Rushing out to investigate, Henry and his son John found a "writhing piece of mystic material"...

... shaped like a charred human hand.

Poor scientists.  Even back then, every new thing that happened left them "baffled."  You have to wonder how they ever manage to do any science at all, given how much time they spend scratching their heads.  [Image is in the Public Domain]

It was at first too hot to touch, but once it cooled, they were able to examine it.  We find out it was "made of no known material," and was "abnormally light for its size."  At first reluctant to part with it, the Prantls realized what money could be made from such an oddity, and leased it to an amusement park in Atlantic City where it was displayed for several years.  Somewhere along the way it was lost, and the Prantls found their temporary fame and dreams of wealth evaporating as quickly as Nahum Gardner's mysterious meteorite.

Not to be outdone, a gem miner in northern California claimed ten years later that he witnessed another meteorite fall, and this one was even better than a flaming hand; it was a flaming skull.  This is only a year before Lovecraft wrote "The Colour Out of Space," and like the first meteorite, it was all over the news, largely because of the indefatigable efforts by its discoverer, Charles E. Grant, to make sure it got into the headlines and stayed there.  Grant said he'd been told about the fall by a "reputable and well-to-do man," and they went out to retrieve the object.  He wouldn't let anyone see it, but sent a photograph to a reporter named Ben Cline, who dutifully wrote a story about it, ending with the wry comment, "[it has] the shape of a human skull, with depressions suggesting facial organs.  The writer's first-hand knowledge of races inhabiting planets other than Mother Earth is limited, and he hesitates, therefore, from the picture, definitely to place the Butte County visitor in the nebular scheme of things."

It didn't take long for people to connect the New Jersey story to the California one, and suggest that the hand and the skull had come from the same body.  If so, it was a little mysterious (1) why one had fallen ten years before the other, (2) how the unfortunate individual got up there in the first place, and (3) why he was coming down in chunks.

Maybe he had the Nahum Gardner falling-to-pieces syndrome, or something.

In any case, people started frantically looking around to find out if other charred body parts had come crashing to Earth, so they could cash in on the notoriety, but no such luck.  What with the hand getting lost right around the same time, and Grant refusing to show anyone the actual skull -- leading many to surmise that he made the whole thing up -- the only result was a flurry of interest in meteorites and, perhaps, Lovecraft's story.

Myself, I wonder if the "hand" was actually a fulgurite -- a long, branching tube of vitrified and fused soil, sand, and debris left behind when lightning strikes the ground.  Some of these things have a remarkably organic look, and the ones I've seen have a striking resemblance to the Prantl photograph.  This would also explain why it was "abnormally light for its size."  As far as Grant's flaming skull goes -- well, like I've said many times before, if you expect me to believe something, show me the goods or else bugger off.  If there was a meteorite at all -- i.e., if the photograph itself wasn't a fake -- its resemblance to a skull is very likely to be nothing more than a combination of pareidolia and Grant jumping up and down shouting, "It looks like a skull, doesn't it?  Doesn't it?"

So that's today's tidbit of historical weirdness.  Meteoritic body parts and one of Lovecraft's best stories.  I'm happy to report that neither the Scituate nor the Quabbin Reservoir seem to have poisoned anyone, and that I haven't heard any reports out of southern New Jersey or northern California suggesting anybody out there had any difficulties with "colours."

Just as well.  What happened to the Gardner family was nasty.  I wouldn't even wish that on Elon Musk, and that's saying something.

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Off kilter

I got an interesting email a few days ago, which I quote (with permission):

I keep running into references to places called "gravity hills" or "magnetic hills" where supposedly some force plays hell with your sense of what's up and what's down.  Trees and walls appear to lean, it's hard to stand up right, stuff like that.  But people say it's more than an illusion, because cars put in neutral at the bottom of an incline roll uphill, and balls placed on what appear to be level surfaces start to roll.

I can't come up with any way any of this could be real, but there are a lot of claims, so it's kind of the "can they all be false?" thing.  What do you know about this, and has it been explained scientifically?  Or is there really something paranormal going on?

I've heard about this phenomenon for years myself, and saying "there are a lot of claims" is a bit of an understatement.  In fact, Wikipedia has a list of reports of such "mystery hills" everywhere from Azerbaijan to Uruguay, and they all kind of have the same characteristics -- that the laws of gravity don't seem to apply, or that there's a strange "magnetic force" pulling stuff (including your proprioception) off kilter.

Let's clear one thing up from the get-go, though; if there is anything going on here, it has nothing to do with magnetism, because our sense of balance is controlled by the semicircular canals, fluid-filled tubes in your inner ear that use the movement of the liquid under the pull of gravity as a way of communicating to your brain "that direction is down."  Messing with this will make you dizzy and/or nauseated, which is why people get motion sickness; the apparent forces caused by spinning around on a carnival ride cause the fluid to slosh about, sending mixed signals to the brain and making some people violently ill.  (Why certain people seem to be more or less immune to motion sickness, and others get nauseated walking across the room, is unknown.)

So even if there was some mysterious "magnetism" at work here, it wouldn't affect your sense of balance unless your inner ears were made of cast iron.

But let's get down to specifics.  Here's how one of the most famous "mystery hills," the "Oregon Vortex," is described in John Godwin's book This Baffling World:

Situated thirty miles from Grant's Pass, the vortex -- which measures roughly 125 feet in diameter -- constitutes, according to its promoters, an electromagnetic phenomenon.

Within the "Oregon Vortex" there stands a hut, dubbed "The House of Mystery."  Its owner, John Lister, says, "Nowever in the area does the visitor stand upright.  Inevitably one assumes a posture that inclines toward magnetic north, beginning with a minimum of divergence from normal at the edge of the area, and increasing to an acute angle as "The House of Mystery" is entered.  So gradually is this latter stage reached that visitors seldom realize the phenomenon until the seemingly impossible posture of the guide or their friends brings a realization of their own tilting."

Suspended from the roof of "The House of Mystery" hangs a heavy steel ball, but that ball presumably doesn't hang straight down.  It would seem to lean inward, pulled toward the center of the hut by some weird gravitational shift.  It is claimed that a person who enters the hut will feel the odd pull quite distinctly; it is further alleged that the power which is exerted will force one to lean over at a ten-degree angle.  Viewers have alleged that a rubber ball, placed on the floor here, will roll uphill.

Another famous one is Magnetic Hill, near Moncton, New Brunswick, where a landmark (a light-colored telephone pole) appears to be the lowest point in the road when viewed from one direction, and the highest when viewed from the other.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jim101, Magnetic Hill Moncton Front, CC BY-SA 3.0]

And of course, these stories are always accompanied with claims of other sorts of paranormal occurrences -- UFOs, ghosts, "skinwalkers," and the like -- and, in the United States at least, the inevitable stories about how the Indigenous people thought the place was cursed or haunted or a sacred burial ground or whatnot.

Now, to address the question -- is there anything to this?

Simple answer: no.

It turns out that humans are remarkably bad at piecing together visual cues with the information we get from our semicircular canals and coming up with a coherent picture of what the space around us is doing.  All it takes is a little messing about with the information we're receiving, and it befuddles us completely.

Take, for example, the following rather simple drawing:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Fibonacci, Zöllner illusion, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The diagonal lines running from the upper left to the lower right are all parallel, despite the fact that (1) they don't look it, and (2) even when you know what's going on and have proven it to yourself with a ruler, they still don't look it.  This is called the Zöllner Illusion, named after its discoverer, the astrophysicist Johann Karl Friederich Zöllner, and is a good indication that our ability to orient visually is not all it's cracked up to be.  (This is why the first thing pilots-in-training are taught is, "trust your instruments, not your senses.")

The "gravity hill" phenomenon is actually nothing more than an optical illusion as well, created by tilted surfaces that appear to be flat (or vice-versa) because the horizon is obscured, landmarks themselves are at an angle, or something is causing the eyes to misperceive the angle of inclination.  The whole thing was the subject of an extensive investigation that resulted in a paper in the journal Psychological Science, which concluded that the phenomenon is the result of a place's odd spatial layout combined with our faulty sensory-perceptive equipment.

So there's no alteration in the pull of gravity in these spots, or a mysterious electromagnetic anomaly, or a Great Disturbance in the Force, or whatever.  I'm not saying they're not fun; optical illusions are endlessly fascinating to me, but it's from the perspective of "wow, our brains are super easy to fool," not because of anything paranormal going on.

Anyhow, thanks to the reader who sent the question.  I always appreciate inquiries.  My opinion is that all of science starts from a desire to go from "We don't know" to "That's curious" to "Let's find out how it works."  

And even if in this case, the answer turns out to be less exciting than a rip in the space-time continuum, it's still pretty interesting.

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Gender bender

Sex is a pretty cool phenomenon, and it's not just because it's kinda fun.

How exactly sexual reproduction first evolved isn't well understood, but its advantages are clear.  Asexually-reproducing species, like most bacteria, a good many protists, and a handful of plants and animals, result in genetic copies -- clones, really -- of the parent organism.  

The problem with this is twofold.  First, clones (being identical) are susceptible to the same pathogens, so a communicable disease that is deadly to one of them will wipe them all out.  In a genetically-diverse population, chances are there'd be some that were resistant or entirely immune; in a monoculture, one epidemic and it's game over.  (That's basically what caused the Irish Potato Famine; a one-two punch of cold, rainy weather and an outbreak of late blight killed nearly all of the island's potato crop, resulting in massive starvation.)

The second problem, though, is subtler, and causes problems even if there's no external environmental risk involved.  It's called Muller's Ratchet, named after American geneticist Hermann Muller, who first described the phenomenon.  Asexual species still undergo variation because of random mutations; at each generation, the DNA picks up what amount to typos.  The whole thing is like a genetic game of Telephone.  Each time the genes pass on, there are minor replication errors that accrue and ultimately will turn the whole genome into unintelligible garbage.

Various asexual species have evolved mechanisms for coping with Muller's Ratchet.  Some bacteria have multiple copies of critical genes, so if one copy gets knocked out by a mutation, they have other copies that still work.  Some evolved conjugation, which is a primitive form of sexual reproduction in which cells pair up and exchange bits of DNA, with the goal being the sharing of undamaged copies of important genes (as well as copies of any novel beneficial mutations that may have occurred).

So asexual reproduction is fast, efficient, and doesn't require finding a partner, but ultimately makes the species susceptible to the double whammy of disease proneness and Muller's Ratchet; sexual reproduction requires finding a partner, but increases overall fitness by improving genetic diversity.

Is there any way to gain both advantages without picking up the disadvantages at the same time?

This is one of the main drivers of evolution in flowering plants.  Some flowering plants can reproduce both sexually (through flowers) and asexually (through rhizomes, bulbs, and so on).  Grasses, for example, are pretty good at both.  A very few -- the commercial variety of bananas is one of the only ones that comes to mind -- only reproduce asexually.  (Which is why bananas have no seeds, and also why growers are in a panic over the spread of fusarium wilt.)  A lot of plant species only reproduce sexually, and this brings up the problem of finding a partner of the opposite sex -- which is difficult when you are stuck in place.

This is where pollinators come in.  Some flowering plants are wind-pollinated, and rely on the air to carry the pollen (containing the male gametes) to the ovules (containing the female gametes).  Others use nectar or color lures to bring in insects, birds, and even a few mammals to act as couriers.  But this risks having the pollinator simply double back and fertilize a flower on the same plant, meaning that the offspring is (more or less) identical to the parent -- obviating the advantage of sexual reproduction.

So a great many species have evolved mechanisms for facilitating cross-pollination and avoiding self-pollination.  Some of the brightly-colored flowers of plants in the genus Salvia have evolved a mechanism where there's a spring-loaded trigger -- a visiting bee trips the trigger and gets smacked by the pollen-bearing stamen, with the intention of startling it enough that it decides to move along and visit a different individual of the same species.  Many orchids have wildly byzantine mechanisms for maximizing the likelihood of cross-pollination.  Other species, such as some of the fruiting trees of the rose family (including cherries, apricots, and peaches) have bisexual flowers, but the stamens of one tree mature at a different time than the ovules do -- making self-pollination impossible.  Apples have a genetic barrier to self-pollination -- if pollen from an apple flower is brought to another flower on the same tree, it recognizes the ovule as genetically identical and simply doesn't fuse.

The reason this comes up is a study that appeared last week in the journal Science, looking at the genetics of gender and pollination in walnuts.  Walnuts, and most of the other members of the family Juglandaceae (which also includes hickories and pecans), are pollinated by the wind.  

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Juglans regia Broadview, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Wind-pollinated plants are most at risk for accidental self-pollination; the wind, after all, isn't going to be attracted or deterred by any kind of mechanical contrivance, and wind-pollinated plants often produce tons of pollen (to maximize the likelihood of at least some of it hitting the target, since inevitably a lot of it is simply blown away and wasted).  This is, incidentally, why most allergy-inducing pollen comes from wind-pollinated plants like grasses, willows, birch, oak, cedar, and (especially) ragweed.

Walnuts, it turns out, solve this problem by switching sex every few weeks -- a particular tree only produces male flowers during one interval, then only female ones the next.  The following year, they do it again -- but changing the order of who is male when.  This renders self-pollination not just unlikely, but impossible.  And the paper, which came out of research at the University of California - Davis, describes the genetic mechanism for how this is controlled.

Oh, but you bigots, do go on and explain to me how in the natural world sex and gender are simple and binary, they're both fixed at conception, male-and-female-He-made-them, and so on and so forth.

Even after years of studying biology, and evolutionary biology in particular, I'm still astonished by the diversity of life, and how many solutions species have evolved to solve the problems of survival, nutrition, and reproduction.  It seems fitting to end this with the final paragraph of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, which echoes that same sense of wonder:

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.  These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less improved forms.  Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.  There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

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Health for profit

Ever since the fatal shooting of United Health CEO Brian Thompson, the whole issue of the ridiculous unaffordability of health care and the capricious, cavalier attitudes of health insurers has been much on people's minds here in the United States.  Around ten percent of Americans have no health insurance at all, meaning they are one health crisis from bankruptcy -- and very likely to forego medical care completely for anything that isn't immediately life-threatening.  Many others are woefully underinsured.

Of the twenty-five wealthiest nations in the world, only three -- Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United States -- do not have some form of government-paid health care for all citizens.  With regards to human rights, not really the company we want to be keeping, is it?

As far as the other wealthy nations go -- well, allow me to cite just one example.

My writer friend Andrew Butters, who lives in Canada (and has given me permission to relate this story), went through the agonizing experience of having his daughter develop a devastating medical condition -- progressive scoliosis.  The disorder was inevitably leading toward debility, nerve and organ damage, and ultimately would have been fatal without significant (and urgent) medical intervention.  Eventually she required twelve hours of surgery, a long hospital stay, and extensive care for months afterward, but made a complete recovery and is now a healthy and happy adult.

The family paid less than $2,000 out of pocket total.  In fact, out of gratitude to the Canadian health care system, Andrew wrote a book about the experience called Bent But Not Broken (highly recommended reading, it's incredibly inspiring) and is able to donate every cent of the proceeds to charities helping other parents in similar situations.

In the United States?  Even with health insurance, this exact same situation would have created massive medical debt they'd be paying off for decades.  For many families, it would have permanently destroyed them financially.

The fact that the other twenty-two wealthiest countries in the world are making health care for all work, and we're not, seems to indicate that we could be doing this, but we just don't want to.  So why is that?  How did all the others come to look upon health care as a right, not a privilege restricted to the rich, and we didn't?

Well, allow me to introduce you to Frederick Ludwig Hoffman.

Hoffman in 1909 [Image is in the Public Domain]

Hoffman was born in 1865 in the town of Varel, Oldenburg, Germany.  His performance in school was rather dismal, and ultimately he realized he wasn't going to make a decent living in Germany, so he emigrated to the United States in 1884, where shortly afterward he was hired as a statistician for the Prudential Insurance Company of America.

He was also a raving racist.

Around this time, African Americans were gaining ground in terms of rights and opportunities, and Hoffman thought this was just terrible.  He was convinced that Blacks were genetically inferior -- not only less intelligent and more prone to crime, but had shorter life spans and more health problems.  That the last-mentioned had to do with mistreatment, poverty, poor nutrition, and lack of access to medical care, didn't seem to occur to him.  But he saw other countries moving toward considering good-quality medical care to be a right; in fact, his native Germany instituted a national health care program in 1885.  Despite the inherent immorality of forcing sick people to pay, as if becoming ill was somehow their fault (or a choice at all), Hoffman was appalled at the thought of this becoming policy in the United States.  He realized that if this happened here, wealthy White people would be shouldering the financial burden of paying for the health care of poor Blacks.

And we couldn't have that.

He wrote a book called Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro which was a mishmash of huge amounts of statistics on illness and death rates, along with a heaping helping of racist tropes, eugenics, arguments against miscegenation, and deliberate avoidance of any mention of the role of social status and environment in human health.  Of course, it played right into the panicky bigotry of the time, not to mention the greed über alles attitudes of the people in charge (remember, this is the era of the Robber Barons).  So rake in the profits and simultaneously make life miserable for Blacks?

Prudential, and other insurance companies, said, "Hell yeah, sign me up!"

Megan Wolff, in the journal Public Health Reports (link provided above), writes:

Insurance is a highly lucrative business, and in the latter 19th century it factored among the biggest, fastest-growing, and most aggressive corporate entities in existence.  Between 1860 and 1870 alone, the number of policies active in New York State jumped from 50,000 to 650,000; by 1868 the sum of insurance throughout the nation exceeded the national debt.  Cutthroat business practices guided corporate policy.  By the mid 1870s, the three largest companies—Metropolitan Life, the Equitable, and Mutual Life—had expanded into a corporate oligopoly that dominated sales in the cities of the northeast United States and maintained an impressive reputation worldwide...

The relatively equal access of African Americans to main-line industrial policies came to a halt... when Prudential announced a decision to reduce life benefits to African Americans by a third, though they would continue to pay the same premiums.  Citing elevated mortality rates among Blacks, the company insisted that its decision was “equitable” and based “solely on the basis of facts.”  Some evidence suggests, however, that the prospect of Black policyholders simply had not occurred to commercial insurers when they launched their industrial policies—at least not in the volumes with which African Americans applied for coverage—and the reduction of benefits was a response to an unanticipated and socially undesirable demand.

There was some effort by states to institute anti-discrimination laws regarding insurance, but Prudential trotted out Hoffman, who was happy to explain his reasoning (backed up, of course, by plenty of statistics).  Few White lawmakers felt all that inclined to argue on the behalf of poor Blacks, who after all had no legal clout, and in fact very little say in anything.

Hoffman, on the other hand, became an overnight celebrity.  In 1901 Prudential started its Department of Statistics -- what we would now call the actuarial department -- with Hoffman at its head.  There's some evidence that his views softened toward the end of his life (he died in 1946), and that he eventually acknowledged the role of social stratification in Blacks' lower life expectancy and higher rate of health problems, but by that time the damage was done.  The corporate control of medical care in the United States was already set in stone, and that was largely due to Hoffman's tireless efforts to prevent African Americans from having health and life insurance.

And as we've seen over and over, once the corporations see a profit to be made, there's no power on Earth that can stop them from doing whatever it takes to achieve it, even if they leave thousands of dead bodies in their wake.  In what kind of crazy, bass-ackwards system can your doctor say, "You must have this treatment or you won't recover," and the insurance company gets to say, "Nah, you don't really need that"?

There's some truth to the fact that looking at the roots of an issue doesn't necessarily inform you about what the issue is now.  That the lack of universal health care in the United States was inspired by racism is less important than what's motivating it in the present.  (After all, during the Civil War and Reconstruction Periods, the Democrats were more often the racists and the Republicans the anti-racists, and that's hardly the case today.)  

But it's at least instructive to consider that the current situation -- where the wealthy have unlimited access to the best medical care, and the the poor are one surgery from bankruptcy -- has its roots in a fundamentally immoral stance, that somehow certain people are deserving of good health and others aren't, and that the greed of corporate leaders should trump any considerations of fairness.  And this kind of built-in social inequity can't go on forever.  While I don't condone Luigi Mangione's actions, I certainly understand them.  As the noblemen and women of pre-Revolutionary France found out, you can't keep taking advantage of people indefinitely and expect them not to react.

So whatever the origin of the insurance industry's motives, right now what they're doing is profiting off the misfortune of others.  For all of the health insurance companies' cheerful slogans about how they're "your partner for good health," the fact remains that the only ones they're actually partners with are their stockholders.

Not that it's likely to improve under the incoming administration, which puts corporate profit above anything else.  So we've got at least another four years of poor people going broke because they had the audacity to get sick at the wrong time.

And it all traces back to the specious research of a racist German statistician who told the insurance companies and other business leaders exactly what they wanted to hear.  The wealthy then twisted the arms of the elected officials -- as they still do -- and the result is an inherently unfair pay-or-die system that is nearly unique amongst industrialized countries.

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Word search

I've always wondered why words have the positive or negative connotations they do.

Ask people what their favorite and least-favorite sounding words are, and you'll find some that are easily explicable (vomit regularly makes the "least-favorite" list), but others are kind of weird.  A poll of linguists identified the phrase cellar door as being the most beautiful-sounding pair of words in the English language -- and look at how many names from fantasy novels have the same cadence (Erebor, Aragorn, Celeborn, Glorfindel, Valinor, to name just a handful from the Tolkien mythos).  On the other hand, I still recall passing a grocery store with my son one day and seeing a sign in the window that said, "ON SALE TODAY: moist, succulent pork."

"There it is," my son remarked.  "A single phrase made of the three ugliest words ever spoken."

Moist, in fact, is one of those universally loathed words; my surmise is the rather oily sound of the /oi/ combination, but that's hardly a scholarly analysis.  The brilliant British comedian Miranda Hart had her own unique take on it:

Another question is why some words are easier to bring to mind than others. This was the subject of a fascinating paper in Nature Human Behavior titled, "Memorability of Words in Arbitrary Verbal Associations Modulates Memory Retrieval in the Anterior Temporal Lobe," by neuroscientists Weizhen Xie, Wilma A. Bainbridge, Sara K. Inati, Chris I. Baker, and Kareem A. Zaghloul of the National Institute of Health.  Spurred by a conversation at a Christmas party about why certain faces are memorable and others are not, study lead author Weizhen Xie wondered if the same was true for words -- and if so, that perhaps it could lead to more accuracy in cognitive testing for patients showing memory loss or incipient dementia.

"Our memories play a fundamental role in who we are and how our brains work," Xie said in an interview with Science Daily.  "However, one of the biggest challenges of studying memory is that people often remember the same things in different ways, making it difficult for researchers to compare people's performances on memory tests.  For over a century, researchers have called for a unified accounting of this variability.  If we can predict what people should remember in advance and understand how our brains do this, then we might be able to develop better ways to evaluate someone's overall brain health."

What the team did is as fascinating as it is simple; they showed test subjects pairs of functionally-unrelated words (say, "hand" and "apple"), and afterward, tested them by giving them one word and asking them to try to recall what word it was paired with.  What they found is that some words were easy to recall regardless of what they were paired with and whether they came first or second in the pair; others were more difficult, again irrespective of position or pairing.

"We saw that some things -- in this case, words -- may be inherently easier for our brains to recall than others," said study senior author Kareem Zaghloul.  "These results also provide the strongest evidence to date that what we discovered about how the brain controls memory in this set of patients may also be true for people outside of the study."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mandeep Singh, Emotions words, CC BY 4.0]

Neither the list of easy-to-remember words nor the list of harder-to-remember ones show any obvious commonality (such as abstract versus concrete nouns, or long words versus short ones) that would explain the difference.  Each list included some extremely common words and some less common ones -- tank, doll, and pond showed up on the memorable list, and street, couch, and cloud on the less-memorable list.  It was remarkable how consistent the pattern was; the results were unequivocal even when the researchers controlled for such factors as educational level, age, gender, and so on.

"We thought one way to understand the results of the word pair tests was to apply network theories for how the brain remembers past experiences," Xie said.  "In this case, memories of the words we used look like internet or airport terminal maps, with the more memorable words appearing as big, highly trafficked spots connected to smaller spots representing the less memorable words.  The key to fully understanding this was to figure out what connects the words."

The surmise is that it has to do with the way our brains network information.  Certain words might act as "nodes" -- memory points that connect functionally to a great many different concepts -- so the brain more readily lands on those words when searching.  Others, however familiar and common they might be, act more as "dead-ends" in brain networking, making only a few conceptual links.  Think of it as trying to navigate through a city -- some places are easy to get to because there are a great many paths that lead there, while others require a specific set of roads and turns.  In the first case, you can get to your destination even if you make one or two directional goofs; in the second, one wrong turn and you're lost.

All of which is fascinating. I know as I've gotten older I've had the inevitable memory slowdown, which most often manifests as my trying to recall a word I know that I know. I often have to (with some degree of shame) resort to googling something that's a synonym and scanning down the list until I find the word I'm looking for, but it makes me wonder why this happens with some words and not with others.  Could it be that in my 64-year-old brain, bits of the network are breaking down, and this affects words with fewer working functional links than ones with a great many of them?

All speculation, of course. I can say that whatever it is, it's really freakin' annoying.  But I need to wrap up this post, because it's time for lunch.  Which is -- I'm not making this up -- leftover moist, succulent pork.

I'll try not to think about it.

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Water worlds

Water is one of those things that seems ordinary until you start looking into it.

The subject always puts me in mind of the deeply poignant Doctor Who episode "The Waters of Mars," which has to be in my top five favorite episodes ever.  (If you haven't seen it, you definitely need to, even if you're not a fanatical Whovian like I am -- but be ready for the three-boxes-of-kleenex ending.)  Without giving you any spoilers, let's just say that the Mars colonists shouldn't have decided to use thawed water from glaciers for their drinking supply.

Once things start going sideways, the Doctor warns the captain of the mission, Adelaide Brooke, that trying to fight what's happening is a losing battle, and says it in a truly shiver-inducing way: "Water is patient, Adelaide.  Water just waits.  Wears down the cliff tops, the mountains.  The whole of the world.  Water always wins."

Even beyond science fiction, water has some bizarre properties.  It's one of the only substances that gets less dense when you freeze it -- if water was like 99% of the compounds in the world, ice would sink, and lakes and oceans would freeze from the bottom up.  Compared to most other liquids, it has a sky-high specific heat (ability to absorb heat energy without much increase in temperature), which is why my wife and I notice the difference in our hot tub when it's set at 100 F rather than 102 F.  A two-degree temperature difference in air temperature, you'd hardly register; two degrees' difference in water represents a lot of extra heat energy.

There's also the huge heat of vaporization (the heat energy required for it to evaporate), which is why sweating cools you down so efficiently.  Both the high specific heat and high heat of vaporization contribute not only to allowing our body temperature easier to regulate, they make climates near bodies of water warmer in winter and cooler in summer than it otherwise would be.  Other odd properties of water include its cohesiveness, which is the key to how water can be transported a hundred meters up the trunk of a redwood tree, and is also why a bellyflop hurts like a mofo.  Finally, it's highly polar -- the molecules have a negatively-charged side and a positively-charged side -- making it an outstanding solvent for other polar compounds (and indirectly leading to several of the other properties I've mentioned).

And those are the characteristics water has at ordinary temperatures and pressures.  If you start changing either or both of these, things get weirder still.  In fact, the whole reason the topic comes up is because of a paper in Astrophysical Journal Letters called "Irradiated Ocean Planets Bridge Super-Earth and Sub-Neptune Populations," by a team led by astrophysicist Olivier Mousis of Aix-Marseille University, about a very strange class of planets where water is in a bizarre state where it's not quite a liquid and not quite a gas.

This state is called being supercritical -- where a fluid can seep through solids like a gas but dissolve materials like a liquid.  For water, the critical point is about 340 C and a pressure 217 times the average atmospheric pressure at sea level -- so nothing you'll run into under ordinary circumstances.  This bizarre fluid has a density about a third that of liquid water at room temperature, so way more dense than your typical gas but way less than your typical liquid.

Mousis et al. have found that some of the "sub-Neptune" exoplanets that have been discovered recently are close enough to their parent stars to have a rocky core surrounded by supercritical water and a steam-bath upper atmosphere -- truly a strange new kind of world even the science fiction writers don't seem to have anticipated.  One of these exoplanets -- K2 18b, which orbits a red dwarf star about 110 light years from Earth -- fits the bill perfectly, and in fact mass and diameter measurements suggest it could be made up of as much as 37% water.  (Compare that to the Earth, which is about 0.02% water by mass.)

So there you are -- some strange features of a substance we all think we know.  Odd stuff, water, however familiar it is.  Even if you don't count the extraterrestrial contaminants that Captain Adelaide Brooke and her ill-fated crew had to contend with.

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Unwinding the spell

In C. S. Lewis's book Mere Christianity, he addresses the question of why there are unkind and unpleasant Christians (and, conversely, kind and pleasant atheists) by claiming that we should be making a comparison instead with how the people in question would have acted otherwise.  He uses the analogy of a toothpaste's advertising claim to give you healthy teeth:

Even then we must be careful to ask the right question.  If Christianity is true then it ought to follow that any Christian will be nicer than the same person would be if he were not a Christian…  Just in the same way, if the advertisements of Whitesmile’s Toothpaste are true it ought to follow that anyone who uses it will have better teeth than the same person would have if he did not use it.

But to point out that I, who use Whitesmile’s (and also have inherited bad teeth from both my parents), have not got as fine a set as some healthy young African boy who never used toothpaste at all, does not, by itself, prove that the advertisements are untrue.  Christian Miss Bates may have an unkinder tongue than unbelieving Dick Firkin.  That, by itself, does not tell us whether Christianity works.  The question is what Miss Bates’s tongue would be like if she were not a Christian and what Dick’s would be like if he became one.

The fact that we have no way of knowing what they would have been like had their beliefs been otherwise -- that C. S. Lewis himself wrote, "To know what would have happened?  No, no one is given that" -- is a snag here (and awfully convenient to his argument), but we'll leave that aside for the moment. 

Miss Bates and Dick, as a result of natural causes and early upbringing, have certain temperaments: Christianity professes to put both temperaments under new management if they will allow it to do so.  What you have a right to ask is whether that management, if allowed to take over, improves the concern.  Everyone knows that what is being managed in Dick Firkin’s case is much ‘nicer’ than what is being managed in Miss Bates’s...

We must, therefore, not be surprised if we find among the Christians some people who are still nasty. There is even, when you come to think it over, a reason why nasty people might be expected to turn to Christ in greater numbers than nice ones.  If you have sound nerves and intelligence and health and popularity and a good upbringing, you are likely to be quite satisfied with your character as it is.  ‘Why drag God into it?’ you may ask.  A certain level of good conduct comes fairly easily to you.  You are not one of those wretched creatures who are always being tripped up by sex, or dipsomania, or nervousness, or bad temper.  Everyone says you are a nice chap and (between ourselves) you agree with them.  You are quite likely to believe that all this niceness is your own doing: and you may easily not feel the need for any better kind of goodness.  Often people who have all these natural kinds of goodness cannot be brought to recognise their need for Christ at all until, one day, the natural goodness lets them down and their self-satisfaction is shattered.  In other words, it is hard for those who are ‘rich’ in this sense to enter the Kingdom.

It is very different for the nasty people – the little, low, timid, warped, thin-blooded, lonely people, or the passionate, sensual, unbalanced people.  If they make any attempt at goodness at all, they learn, in double quick time, that they need help.  It is Christ or nothing for them.  It is taking up the cross and following -- or else despair.  They are the lost sheep; He came specially to find them.  They are (in one very real and terrible sense) the ‘poor’: He blessed them.  They are the ‘awful set’ he goes about with-and of course the Pharisees say still, as they said from the first, ‘If there were anything in Christianity those people would not be Christians.’

Lewis's apologetics are, unfortunately, specious, and not only for the reason I noted.  His sharp writing style and folksy arguments are understandably appealing, but here -- like many places in Mere Christianity -- his logic doesn't hold up to close scrutiny.  In fact, in the case of "niceness," he's got it backwards.  There is abundant evidence that Christianity (or any other religion) doesn't take what you were born with and sanctify it, make it better than it would have been; instead, it amplifies your natural tendencies.  

So a person born with a kind, forgiving, loving, benevolent nature might well be impelled to do even better if (s)he espoused a religion that valued those things.  But a narrow-minded, spiteful, violent, arrogant person who joins a religion becomes a Tomás de Torquemada, a Cotton Mather, a Judge Jeffreys... or a Jim Bakker or John Hagee or Greg Locke or Rick Wiles.  Awful people who become devout rarely improve their behavior; all their conversion usually accomplishes is to give their hatefulness a nice added gloss of self-righteousness.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Aronsyne, C.S.-Lewis, CC BY-SA 4.0]

I got to thinking about Lewis's argument while I was reading an article yesterday in The Daily Beast entitled, "Why Jimmy Carter's Life Should Make the Christian Right Feel Ashamed," and my immediate reaction was to add, "... But It Won't."  As I'm sure all of you know by now, President Carter died a few days ago at the venerable age of 100, and there's been much attention given to his amazingly selfless work for charity, most notably Habitat for Humanity.  The difficulty for Christians, however, is the degree to which Carter's Christianity is being looked upon as an outlier.  In the last twenty years, Christianity has come to be associated with some of the most vile individuals I can think of, culminating in their wholehearted support of an amoral, viciously vengeful, narcissistic adjudicated rapist for president.

The article's author, Keli Goff, writes:

As a person of faith, I have been horrified to watch Christianity’s fall from grace in mainstream America today.  Having mentioned my church in passing to a group of peers, I was once recently met with surprise—surprise that I’m a practicing Christian because, I “seem like a nice person.”  I’m no biblical scholar, but I’m pretty sure that if people conflate your religion with being a terrible human being you’re probably doing it wrong.  Yet in recent years that has arguably become the face of mainstream Christianity, and any Christian who cares about the future of our faith should be deeply concerned.

But... other than a handful of exceptions, they're not.  The vast majority of them are completely unapologetic about their hatreds, whether it's toward minorities, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, liberals, or just anyone who's not a straight white conservative American.  

Yesterday I drove past a house where there was a huge flag flying saying "God, Guns, and Trump."  How can this now be the rallying cry for people who claim to follow the same man who said "Turn the other cheek" and "Bring unto me the little children" and "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth"?

Or is that "Woke Jesus," and now we have to follow the new and improved gun-toting, anti-immigrant, Murika-loving, queer-bashing Jesus?

Given that this is the new public face of Christianity in the United States, it is perhaps unsurprising that churches are hemorrhaging members.  Goff quotes statistics that there has been a twelve-percent decline in self-identification as Christian just in the last decade; New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof stated that "More people have left the church in the last 25 years than all the new people who became Christians from the First Great Awakening, Second Great Awakening and Billy Graham crusades combined."

I find this encouraging, but perhaps not for the reason you might be thinking.  It's certainly not because I'm a nonbeliever myself, and have some misguided desire for everyone to think like me.  I honestly have no issue with what answers people come up with for the Big Questions, about the meaning of life and their place in the universe and the existence of a deity.  We all have to figure those out (or not) as well as we can, and who am I to criticize how someone else squares that circle?  What I judge people on is not belief but behavior, and if the ugly, vitriolic diatribes of the likes of Kenneth Copeland are inducing people to say, "this is not for me," then... good.  That should be your reaction to ignorance, nastiness, and intolerance.

And if the leaders of the Christian churches who are seeing their congregations shrinking don't like this -- well, they'd best figure it out.

As I mentioned earlier, however, I'm not optimistic about their coming to the right conclusions.  Today's Christian leaders seem to excel at considering the question and then getting the wrong answer -- blaming it on secular education, the gays, the liberals, or even kicking it up a level and blaming Satan himself.  That the fault might lie in their own hateful, exclusive, judgmental attitudes doesn't seem to have crossed most of their minds.

C. S. Lewis at least recognized this much -- that if you're on the wrong road, you don't get to your destination safely by continuing to forge doggedly down the same path.  In The Great Divorce, he writes:

I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road.  A sum can be put right: but only by going back til you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on.  Evil can be undone, but it cannot 'develop' into good.  Time does not heal it.  The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, 'with backward mutters of dissevering power' -- or else not.

Which is exactly right.  The problem, though, is that first you have to realize you've done the sum wrong.  And in this case, I don't think that's happened yet.  There are too many other convenient targets to blame.  Even someone like the near-saintly Jimmy Carter holding up a mirror to what evangelical Christianity has become is unlikely to wake anyone up, especially now that the Christofascists are in the political ascendency here in the United States.

And as long as that's the case, they're almost certainly going to continue down this road, watching their flocks dwindling away to nothing, and acting entirely baffled about why their message has lost its appeal.

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