Resisting the barrage

The flood of awful, outrage-inducing, and flat-out insane news lately has made it hard to focus on anything else.

Just in the day prior to my writing this:

• The U.S. Senate confirmed a wildly unqualified Christofascist woman-abusing drunkard to lead the largest and best-funded military in the world
• Trump summarily fired seventeen inspectors-general at the offices of State, Veterans' Affairs, HUD, Interior, Energy, and Defense, effectively removing any capacity for oversight
• ICE raids have begun in earnest, and have included churches, preschools, and schools; among those arrested/harassed have included a military officer who was born in the U.S. but happens to be the wrong color, and, in a height of irony, Native Americans
• The Episcopal bishop of Washington D.C. was called "nasty" by Trump, and has received death threats from his followers (and a threat of deportation by a MAGA congressman) for... of all things... urging mercy, kindness, and empathy toward those who are suffering
• By executive order, Trump removed the $35 cap on medications for people on Medicare and Medicaid, profiting pharmaceuticals companies at the expense of the elderly and poor
• Elon Musk has doubled down on his Nazi salute at the Inauguration by making a series of sick puns about names of prominent Nazi officials, followed by a laugh-till-you-cry emoji
• The GOP has proposed revisions to the budget that include eliminating the mortgage interest deduction, making it harder for working-class people to afford to purchase a house

And those are just the ones that come to mind immediately.

It is unsurprising if we're feeling overwhelmed by all of this.  I've had to limit my time reading the news -- given my capacity for spiraling into depression even in normal times, I can't risk letting all this take a sledgehammer to my mental health.  And keep in mind that this is what Trump and his cronies want; the nuclear bomb of lunacy that has marked the first two weeks of Trump 2.0 is, at least in part, intended to create a Gish gallop of horrors so demoralizing that the opposition simply gives up.

That is exactly what we cannot afford to do.  Instead, let the barrage of bad news stiffen your resolve.  There's a line from the song "Turning Away," by the fantastic Scottish singer/songwriter Dougie MacLean, that applies here: "Words cannot extinguish us, however hard they're thrown."

And this brings me to a documentary I watched last week that you all must make sure you see.

It's called Porcelain War, and was the winner in the documentary category at Sundance last year.  It's about two brilliant Ukrainian porcelain artists, the husband-and-wife team of Slava Leontyev and Anya Stasenko, whose delicate, whimsical, and stunningly decorated animal sculptures charmed me the first time I saw them, in an online ceramics workshop Anya led that I took about four years ago.  I've followed them ever since, and their work never fails to make me smile.

Then came Putin's invasion of Ukraine, and the horror show that followed.

Slava and Anya live in Kharkiv, which has been heavily attacked, but have refused to leave.  Slava volunteered to train infantry, so he's away from home a lot of the time, and has often found himself in the middle of the battles.  In the film, he talks about how much he hates fighting -- and, in fact, hates the guns and other weapons he is training his fellow soldiers to use.  ("They're only for one purpose," he says -- "killing other human beings").  But he is unequivocal that defending his home and his fellow Ukrainians is nothing less than an absolute duty.  The only other choice is to let Putin win, and that is simply not an option.

But then, when he gets leave to come home -- he and Anya go back to creating sweet, beautiful pieces of art.

The juxtaposition of the atrocities of the invasion with the staggering loveliness of Slava and Anya's delicate porcelain work is both inspiring and heartbreaking.  "If the fighting makes us stop creating beautiful things," Slava says, "we've already lost."

So as counterintuitive as it sounds, we need to take inspiration from Slava and Anya, and fight hard against letting despair freeze us into inaction.  That's what Trump and his cadre want.  And not only do we need to push back against the flood of evil that threatens to engulf us, we need to commit ourselves to continuing to create beauty.  As Slava Leontyev points out, the world can still be a beautiful place, if we work to make it so -- despite what is happening around us.

"It's easy to scare people," he says.  "But it's hard to forbid them to live...  Ukraine is like porcelain.  Easy to break, but impossible to destroy."

May we show such resilience, dedication, and spirit in the war we will fight over the next four years.

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Strange attractors

Dear Readers,

I am going to be taking a short break from Skeptophilia, so this will be my last post for a week and a half.  Lord willin' an' the creek don't rise, as my grandma used to say, I'll be back at it on Monday, January 27.

cheers,

Gordon

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I've always found the concept of the Strong Anthropic Principle wryly amusing.

The idea here is that something (usually a benevolent deity) fine-tuned the universe in just such a way to be hospitable for us -- for having forces perfectly balanced to hold matter together without causing a runaway collapse, for having gravitational pull strong enough to form stars and planets, for having electromagnetic forces of the right magnitude to generate the chemical reactions that ultimately led to organic molecules and life, and so on.

To me, this argument ignores two awkward facts.  First, of course our universe has exactly the right characteristics to generate and support life; if it didn't, we wouldn't be here to consider the question.  (This is called the "Weak Anthropic Principle," for obvious reasons.)  Second, though -- the Strong Anthropic Principle conveniently avoids the fact that a large percentage of the Earth, and damn near one hundred percent of the universe as a whole, is completely and unequivocally hostile to us, and probably to just about any living thing out there.

It's one of those hostile bits that got me thinking about the whole issue today, because astronomers recently observed a phenomenon called a fast radio burst in our own galaxy -- a mere thirty thousand light years away -- and the thing that produces it is not only bizarre in the extreme, but is something that we're very, very lucky not to be any closer to.

The beast that produces this is called a magnetar, and appears to be a rapidly-spinning neutron star, with a mass of two to three times that of the Sun but compressed into a sphere only about twenty kilometers in diameter.  This means that the surface gravitational attraction is astronomical (*rimshot*).  Any irregularities in the topography would be crushed, giving it a smooth surface with a relief less than that of a brand-new billiard ball.

The most bizarre thing about magnetars, however, is the immense magnetic field that gives them their name.  Your typical magnetar has an average magnetic field flux density of ten billion Teslas -- on the order of a quadrillion times the field strength of the Earth.  This is why they are, to put it mildly, really fucking dangerous.  The article in Astronomy about the discovery explained it graphically (if perhaps using slightly more genteel language):

The magnetic field of a magnetar is about a hundred million times stronger than any human-made magnet.  That’s strong enough that a magnetar would horrifically kill you if you got within about 620 miles (1,000 km) of it.  There, its insanely strong magnetic field would pluck electrons from your body’s atoms, essentially dissolving you.

This brought up a question in my mind, though; magnetic fields of any kind are made by moving electrical charges -- so how can a neutron star (made, as one would guess, entirely of neutrons) have any magnetic field at all, much less an "insanely strong" one?   Turns out I'm not the only one to ask this question, as I found out when I did some digging and stumbled on the Q-and-A page belonging to Cole Miller, Professor of Astronomy at the University of Maryland.  Miller says the reason is that not all of the particles in a neutron star are neutrons.  While the structure as a whole is electrically neutral, about ten percent of the total mass is made up of electrons and protons that are free to move.  Take those charged particles and whirl them around hundreds of times per second, and you have a magnetic field that is not only insanely strong, but really fucking dangerous.

This all comes up because of the observation of a thirty-millisecond-long fast radio burst coming from within our galaxy.  All the others that have been detected were in other galaxies, and the distances involved (not to mention how sporadic they are, and how quickly they're over) make them difficult to explain.  But this comparatively nearby one gave us a load of new information -- especially when a second burst came from the same magnetar a few days later.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons ESO/L. Calçada, Artist’s impression of the magnetar in the extraordinary star cluster Westerlund 1, CC BY 4.0]

Astronomers and astrophysicists are still trying to explain the phenomenon, including odd features of this particular one such as its relative faintness.  As compared to bursts from other galaxies this one was a thousand times less luminous.  Why is still a matter of conjecture.  Is it because bursts this weak occur in other galaxies, but from this distance would be undetectable?  Is it because the distant galaxies are much younger (remember, looking out in space is equivalent to looking back in time), so stronger bursts only happen early in a galaxy's evolution?  At this point, we don't know.  As Yvette Cendes, author of the Astronomy article, put it:

It is far too early to draw a firm conclusion about whether this relatively faint FRB-like signal is the first example of a galactic fast radio burst — making it the smoking gun to unlocking the entire FRB mystery.  And there are also still many preliminary questions left to answer.  For example, how often do these fainter bursts happen?  Are they beamed so not all radiation is equally bright in all directions?  Do they fall on a spectrum of FRBs with varying intensities, or are they something entirely new?  And how are the X-ray data connected?

As usual with science, the more we know, the more questions we have.

In any case, here we have a phenomenon that's cool to observe, but that you wouldn't want to be at all close to.  Not only do we have the magnetic field to worry about, but the burst itself is so energetic that anything nearby would get flash-fried.

So "the universe is fine-tuned to be congenial to us" only works if you add, "... except for the 99.9% of it that is actively trying to kill us."  Not that this makes it any less magnificent, but it does make you feel a little... tiny, doesn't it?  Probably a good thing.  Humans do stupid stuff when they start thinking they're the be-all-end-all.

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NEW!  We've updated our website, and now -- in addition to checking out my books and the amazing art by my wife, Carol Bloomgarden, you can also buy some really cool Skeptophilia-themed gear!  Just go to the website and click on the link at the bottom, where you can support your favorite blog by ordering t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, bumper stickers, and tote bags, all designed by Carol!

Take a look!  Plato would approve.

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Life out of round

All my life, I've been pulled by two opposing forces.

One of them is the chaos-brain I described in yesterday's post, which I seem to have been born with.  The other is a ferocious attempt to counteract that tendency by controlling the absolute hell out of my surroundings.  I know a lot of this came from the way I was raised; throughout my childhood, nothing I ever did was good enough, and any compliments came along with an appended list (notarized and in triplicate) of all the things I should have done differently and/or could have done better.  

The result is that I do a great deal of overcompensation.  I became fanatically neat, because organizing my physical space was a way of coping with the fact that my brain is like a car with bald tires and no brakes.  My classroom was so organized and clean you could just about eat off the floor (and keep in mind that it was a biology lab).  As a teacher, I strove to make use of every moment we had, and faulted myself whenever things didn't go well or there was an eventuality I hadn't planned for.

I didn't expect perfection from my students, but I did from myself.  And, in some parts of my life, it served me well enough.

The problem is, that approach doesn't work when you apply it to the arts.

I'm not even talking about the "learning curve" issue, here.  Even when I've attained some level of proficiency, I still expect nothing less than perfection, excoriating myself for every scene in a story that didn't come out the way I wanted, every slightly lopsided piece of pottery, every missed note when I play music.

In theory, I'm one hundred percent in agreement with the quote from Ludwig van Beethoven -- "To play a wrong note is insignificant; to play without passion is inexcusable."  Or, more accurately, I believe that for everyone else.  It's much harder to treat myself so forgivingly.

The result has been an overwhelming case of impostor syndrome, coupled with fear of criticism -- which will, in my warped way of looking at things, only confirm what I've thought about myself all along.  I'm at least working on getting my writing out there under the public eye, despite the inherent risks of poor sales and/or bad reviews, but it's been harder in other aspects of my creative life.  I'm still at the stage where I had to have my arm twisted (hard) to induce me to join as a flutist in a contradance band, and it's damn near impossible to get me to play the piano in front of anyone else (including my wife).  But I'm harshest about my own skill when it comes to my artistic work, which is pottery.  I keep very little of what I make, and most of what I do keep are the pieces that are simple and purely functional -- bowls and mugs and the like.  The vast majority of the sculptures and other, more unusual, pieces I make end up given that dreadful label of "not good enough" and are smashed against the concrete wall of the back of our house. 

All along, I had the attitude -- again, directly consonant with my upbringing -- that this is how you improve, that constant self-criticism should act as some kind of impetus to getting better, to ridding your work of those dreaded mistakes, to attaining that fabled ability to create something with which others could not find fault.

It's only been recently that I've realized that this approach is completely antithetical to creativity.

I got to thinking about this after watching an online pottery workshop with the wonderful New Hampshire potter Nick Sevigney, whose pieces are weird and whimsical and unexpected.  A lot of his pottery has a steampunk feeling, a sense of having been put together from a random assemblage of parts.  It was a revelation to watch him piece together cut slabs of clay, not caring if the result was a little uneven or had a rough edge.  In fact, he embraces those seeming imperfections, turning them "from a bug into a feature."

So I decided to see if I could do a few pieces that riffed off of his approach.

I'm most comfortable on the potter's wheel, so I started out throwing three medium-sized white stoneware bowls.  I've gotten pretty good at getting that smooth curve and rounded profile, with a perfectly circular rim, that is what most of us shoot for when creating a bowl.  

Usually, that's where I'd stop.  If it passed my critical assessment -- not lopsided, decent weight, evenly thick walls, nice smooth surface -- I'd keep it.  Otherwise, into the scrap bucket it'd go.  But here... that was only the first step.

One of the techniques Nick does is taking a piece, cutting chunks out of it, adding texture to the chunk, then reattaching it.  You'd think that because you're putting the piece back where it had been, it'd fit perfectly; but the problem is that adding texture (usually using stamps or rollers) stretches and flattens the clay, so inevitably it ends up larger than the hole it came from.  Nick just forces it to fit, warping the piece's profile -- and instead of worrying about that, he often adds some circular marks that make it look like the piece was inexpertly riveted or screwed back on.

He leans into the unevenness hard.  And the result is something magical, like a relic you might find in a demolished nineteenth century mad scientist's laboratory, something stitched together and broken and reassembled upside down and backwards.

So I took my three smooth, undamaged stoneware bowls and gave it a try.

One of the results

The hardest part -- unsurprising, perhaps, given my personality -- was making the first cut.  Even knowing that if I didn't like the result, I have more clay and could always make another plain, boring, but "perfect" bowl, I sat there for some time, knife in hand, as if the Pottery Gods would smite me if I touched that sleek, classic profile.  Slicing and pressing and marring and deforming it felt like deliberately choosing to ruin something "nice."  

But maybe "nice" isn't what we should be shooting for, as creatives.

Maybe the goal should be somewhere out there beyond "nice."  The point, I realized, is not to retread the safe, secure footsteps I've always taken, but to take a deep breath and launch off into the shadowlands.

So I cut a big chunk from the side of the bowl, got out my texturing stamps and rollers, and set to work.

I was half expecting to give up after a few attempts and throw the whole thing into the scrap bucket, but I didn't.  I found I actually kind of liked the result, as different as it is from what I usually make.  And what surprised me even more was that once I got into it, it was...

... fun.

I've never been much good at "having fun."  In general, I give new meaning to the phrase "tightly wound."  Letting loose and simply being silly is way outside my wheelhouse.  (I know I shortchanged my boys as a dad when they were little simply by my seeming inability to play.)  But I've come to realize that the spirit of playfulness is absolutely critical to creativity.  I don't mean that every creative endeavor should be funny or whimsical; but that sense of pushing the boundaries, of letting the horse have its head and seeing where you end up, is at the heart of what it means to be creative.

I was recently chatting with another author about times when inspiration in writing will surprise you, coming at you seemingly out of nowhere.  When it happens, the feeling is honestly like the ideas are originating outside of my own brain.  There are two examples of this that come to mind immediately, cases where characters to whom I'd never intended to give a big role basically said, "Nuh-uh, you're not sidelining me.  I'm important, and here's why."  (If you're curious, the two are Jennie Trahan in my novella "Convection," and most strikingly, Marig Kastella in The Chains of Orion, who kind of took over the last third of the book, and became one of my favorite characters I've ever written.)  When that happens, it means I've loosened my death-grip on the story, and given my creativity space to breathe.

And it always is a hallmark of things going really right with the writing process.

So I guess the point of all this is to encourage you to stretch your boundaries in your own creative work.  I won't say "lose your fears" -- that's hopeless advice -- but try something new despite them.  (Either something new within your chosen creative medium, or something entirely new.)  Be willing to throw your creative life out of round, to press it into new and unexpected configurations, to turn in a new direction and see where you end up.  There's good stuff to be found there outside of the narrow, constricted, breathless little boundaries of what we've always been told is "the right way to do things."  Take a risk.  Then take another one.  The goal of creativity is not to play it safe.

As French author and Nobel laureate André Gide put it, "One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore."

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NEW!  We've updated our website, and now -- in addition to checking out my books and the amazing art by my wife, Carol Bloomgarden, you can also buy some really cool Skeptophilia-themed gear!  Just go to the website and click on the link at the bottom, where you can support your favorite blog by ordering t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, bumper stickers, and tote bags, all designed by Carol!

Take a look!  Plato would approve.

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Mirror, mirror, on the wall

Sometimes my mental processes are like a giant exercise in free association.

I've always been this way.  My personal motto could be, "Oh, look, something shiny!"  When I was a kid my parents had a nice set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, and in those pre-internet days I used them for research for school projects.  So I'd start by looking something up -- say, the provisions of the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution -- and I'd notice something in the article, which I'd then have to look up, then I'd notice something there, and so forth and so on, and pretty soon I was reading the entry about the mating habits of wombats.

My younger son inherited this tendency.  Conversations between the two of us resemble a pinball game.  More than once we've stopped and tried to figure out how we got from Point A to Point Z, but sometimes the pathway is just too weird and convoluted to reconstruct.  Maybe that's why I love James Burke's iconic television series Connections; the lightning-fast zinging from event to event and topic to topic, which Burke uses to brilliant (and often comical) effect, is what's happening inside my skull pretty much all the time.

It's a wonder I ever get anything done.

The reason this comes up is because I was chatting with a friend of mine, the wonderful author K. D. McCrite, about trying to find a topic for Skeptophilia that I hadn't covered before.  She asked if I'd ever looked at the role of mirrors in claims of the paranormal.  I said I hadn't, but that it was an interesting idea.

So I started by googling "mirrors paranormal," and this led me to the Wikipedia article on "scrying."  Apparently this was the practice of gazing into one of a wide variety of objects or substances to try to contact the spirit world.  The article says:

The media most commonly used in scrying are reflective, refractive, translucent, or luminescent surfaces or objects such as crystals, stones, or glass in various shapes such as crystal balls, mirrors, reflective black surfaces such as obsidian, water surfaces, fire, or smoke, but there is no special limitation on the preferences or prejudices of the scryer; some may stare into pitch dark, clear sky, clouds, shadows, or light patterns against walls, ceilings, or pond beds.  Some prefer glowing coals or shimmering mirages.  Some simply close their eyes, notionally staring at the insides of their own eyelids, and speak of "eyelid scrying."

I think next time I'm taking a nap and my wife wants me to get up and do chores, I'm going to tell her to leave me alone because I'm "eyelid scrying."

Yeah, that'll work.

Anyhow, what scrying seems like to me is staring into something until you see something, with no restrictions on what either something is.  It does mean that you're almost guaranteed success, which is more than I can say for some divinatory practices.  But this brought me to the "Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn," because they apparently recommended mirror-scrying as a way of seeing who was exerting a positive or negative effect on you, and believed that if you stared into a mirror you'd see the faces of those people standing behind you.  This was preferably done in a dimly-lit room, because there's nothing like making everything harder to see for facilitating your seeing whatever it was you thought you were gonna see.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

On this site, there is a list of famous members, and to my surprise one of them was Charles Williams, a novelist who was a close friend of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.  His novels Descent into Hell, All Hallow's Eve, The Greater Trumps, The Place of the Lion, and War in Heaven are fascinatingly weird, like nothing else I've ever read -- a combination of urban fantasy and fever dream.  He was also a devout Christian, so his membership in the Golden Dawn strikes me as odd, but I guess he wasn't the only one to try blending Christianity with neo-druidic mysticism.

At this point I felt I was getting a little far afield from my original intent, so I decided to leave Wikipedia (with its multiple internal links and temptations to wander) and found a site about the history of mirrors and their uses.  On this site I learned that there's a tradition of covering all the mirrors in the house when a family member dies, to prevent the dear departed's soul from becoming trapped in the mirror.  The problem is, if the deceased's spirit wants to hang around, it can simply sidestep -- there's a whole lore about spirits and other paranormal entities which can only be seen out of the corner of your eye.

This immediately grabbed my attention because it's the basis of my novella Periphery.  The idea of the story is that an elderly woman decides to have laser surgery to correct her nearsightedness, and afterwards she starts seeing things in her peripheral vision that no one else sees, and which disappear (or resolve into ordinary objects) when she looks at them straight-on.

The problem is, these things are real, and alive.  And pretty soon, she realizes that one of them has become aware that she can see it -- and it starts to stalk her.

*cue scary music*

This led me to look into accounts of "shadow people" who exist on the fringes of reality and are only (partly) visible as dark silhouettes that flicker into and out of existence in your peripheral vision.  From there, I jumped to a page over at the ever-entertaining site Mysterious Universe about "static entities," which are not only vague and shadowy but appear to be made of the same stuff as the static on a television screen.  I don't want to steal the thunder from Brent Swancer (the post's author) because the whole thing is fun reading, but here's one example of an account he cites:

All of a sudden I had a really powerful urge to look at the end of the hallway.  We had recently brought a coat stand from a bootsale and this was in the middle of the hallway now.  As I stood there I saw a human outline but entirely filled with TV like static, I remember little bits of yellow and blue in it but was mainly white and it came out of the bedroom on the left and was in a running stance but it was really weird because it was in slow motion and it ran from the left to the back door on the right.  As it ran it grabbed the coat stand and pulled it down with it and it fell to the floor.  I was just standing there after in shock...  I ran to my sister and told her what happened and when we went back to the hallway the stand was still on the floor.  That was the only time I saw it, I don’t know why I saw it or why it pulled the stand down, it was all just surreal.  I did have some other experiences in that house that were paranormal so maybe it was connected.

But unfortunately at the end of this article was a list of "related links," and one of them was, "Raelians' ET Embassy Seeks UN Help and Endorsement," which is about a France-based group who believes that the Elohim of the Bible were extraterrestrials who are coming back, and they want the United Nations to prepare a formal welcome for them, so of course I had to check that out.

At this point, I stopped and said, "Okay, what the hell was I researching again?"  The only one in the room with me was my puppy Jethro, and he clearly had no idea, because he's got an even shorter attention span than I do.  So my apologies to K. D., not to mention my readers.  The whole mirrors thing was honestly a good idea, and it probably would have made an awesome post in the hands of someone who has an ability to stay focused longer than 2.8 seconds and isn't distracted every time a squirrel farts in the back yard.  But who knows?  Maybe you learned something anyhow.  And if you followed any of the links, tell me where you ended up.  I can always use a new launch point for my digressions.

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NEW!  We've updated our website, and now -- in addition to checking out my books and the amazing art by my wife, Carol Bloomgarden, you can also buy some really cool Skeptophilia-themed gear!  Just go to the website and click on the link at the bottom, where you can support your favorite blog by ordering t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, bumper stickers, and tote bags, all designed by Carol!

Take a look!  Plato would approve.

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Whiplash

Like many people, I've been watching the news, photographs, and video footage coming in from the fires in the Los Angeles region with feelings of absolute horror.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Toastt21, PalisadesFire fromDowntown, CC BY-SA 4.0]

As of the time of this writing, ten people have died, 34,000 acres have burned, and 200,000 people are under mandatory evacuation orders.  At least ten thousand structures -- homes and businesses -- have burned to the ground.  And while the high winds that have been driving the spread of the wildfires and making fighting them difficult to impossible are supposed to moderate this weekend, meteorologists have predicted them to increase again early next week.

Because there's no human tragedy so heartwrenching that Donald Trump won't use it to score political points, he's gone on Truth Social repeatedly in the last couple of days to say the whole thing is Governor Gavin "Newscum"'s fault, presumably for not raking the forests or going up to Canada to turn on the "very large faucet" that is holding back all the water from the western half of the United States.  Not a word of empathy for the people who've had their homes and their livelihoods destroyed, not a mention of the scale of this catastrophe.

It's what we've come to expect from leaders who have zero compassion and no benchmarks for conduct except for profit, cronyism, and revenge.

Note, too, that there's been no mention that the ultimate cause of this disaster is anthropogenic climate change.  No, gotta find a way that the Democrats are to blame, even though we've been the ones who have been warning about this for years.  In fact, just this week a study was published in the journal National Review of the Earth and the Environment that directly attributes the risk of devastating fire outbreaks to climate change -- more specifically, to a phenomenon called hydroclimate whiplash.

One of the results of global warming that is hard to get people to understand is that it isn't uniform.  The entire world isn't going to gradually slide into becoming a tropical rain forest.  The polar vortex phenomenon we've seen here in the northeastern United States over the last few years is actually one of the predictions of climate change models; the overall warming of the Earth causes a weakening of the polar jet stream, causing it to meander like a river crossing a flat plain.  Loops of the jet stream are pushed south, and those meanders allow icy polar air to move much farther south than normal.  So these deep cold snaps are actually caused by anthropogenic climate change; they're not an argument against it.

Likewise, rainfall and snowfall patterns aren't going to move uniformly in one direction, they're expected to fluctuate wildly.  This is hydroclimate whiplash, and is at the root of the Los Angeles fires.  The rainy season in early 2024 in southern California was abnormally wet (in fact, there were multiple damaging mudslides caused by what are called "atmospheric rivers" dumping huge quantities of rain and snow).  This triggered explosive growth in fast-growing plants like grasses and annual and perennial weeds.  The summer that followed was abnormally dry, and the winter 2024-2025 rainy season basically hasn't happened yet.  So you had what amounted to a tinder box of dried-up plants, just waiting for a spark to start the conflagration.

"The global consequences of hydroclimate whiplash include not only floods and droughts, but the heightened danger of whipsawing between the two, including the bloom-and-burn cycle of overwatered then overdried brush, and landslides on oversaturated hillsides where recent fires removed plants with roots to knit the soil and slurp up rainfall," said Daniel Swain, climatologist with UCLA, who co-authored the study.  "Every fraction of a degree of warming speeds the growing destructive power of the transitions."

You won't hear a word of this from Donald Trump and his cronies, of course.  Not while they have Joe Biden and Gavin Newsom to blame, and certainly not as long as the GOP is in the pockets of the fossil fuels industry.  Trump's pronouncements on the wildfires have contained, to quote CNN's Daniel Dale, a "staggering amount of wrongness," but I guess now we're back to living in the "alternative facts" world we were in from 2016 to 2020.

Since we've now lost our opportunity here in the United States to put the brakes on fossil fuel use, at least for the next four years, look for more extremes to come.  We can expect bigger storms, more heat waves and polar vortexes, more atmospheric rivers and catastrophic droughts.  We tried to warn people; hell, I've been writing about this topic here for fifteen years, and was discussing it in my classes three decades ago.

Not that the people in charge were listening.  As Upton Sinclair put it, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

So there's nothing we can do now but to put pressure on legislators -- frustrating though that's likely to be in the current political climate -- and prepare our own selves for weathering the storms, literal and figurative.  Find places to donate to help those displaced by the fires, some of whom have lost everything.  (Here's just one of many options.)  

Most importantly to the bigger picture: keep speaking up against the lies coming from Trump and his allies.  We can't let misinformation shout more loudly than the truth.

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NEW!  We've updated our website, and now -- in addition to checking out my books and the amazing art by my wife, Carol Bloomgarden, you can also buy some really cool Skeptophilia-themed gear!  Just go to the website and click on the link at the bottom, where you can support your favorite blog by ordering t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, bumper stickers, and tote bags, all designed by Carol!

Take a look!  Plato would approve.

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Defanging the basilisk

The science fiction trope of a sentient AI turning on the humans, either through some sort of misguided interpretation of its own programming or from a simple desire for self-preservation, has a long history.  I first ran into it while watching the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which featured the creepily calm-voiced computer HAL-9000 methodically killing the crew one after another.  But the iteration of this idea that I found the most chilling, at least at the time, was an episode of The X Files called "Ghost in the Machine."

The story -- which, admittedly, seemed pretty dated on recent rewatch -- featured an artificial intelligence system that had been built to run an entire office complex, controlling everything from the temperature and air humidity to the coordination of the departments housed therein.  Running the system, however, was expensive, and when the CEO of the business talks to the system's designer and technical consultant and recommends shutting it down, the AI overhears the conversation, and its instinct to save its own life kicks in.

Exit one CEO.

The fear of an AI we create suddenly deciding that we're antithetical to its existence -- or, perhaps, just superfluous -- has caused a lot of people to demand we put the brakes on AI development.  Predictably, the response of the techbros has been, "Ha ha ha ha ha fuck you."  Myself, I'm not worried about an AI turning on me and killing me; much more pressing is the fact that the current generative AI systems are being trained on art, writing, and music stolen from actual human creators, so developing (or even using) them is an enormous slap in the face to those of us who are real, hard-working flesh-and-blood creative types.  The result is that a lot of artists, writers, and musicians (and their supporters) have objected, loudly, to the practice.

Predictably, the response of the techbros has been, "Ha ha ha ha ha fuck you."

We're nowhere near a truly sentient AI, so fears of some computer system taking a sudden dislike to you and flooding your bathroom then shorting out the wiring so you get electrocuted (which, I shit you not, is what happened to the CEO in "Ghost in the Machine") are, to put it mildly, overblown.  We have more pressing concerns at the moment, such as how the United States ended up electing a demented lunatic who campaigned on lowering grocery prices but now, two months later, says to hell with grocery prices, let's annex Canada and invade Greenland.

But when things are uncertain, and bad news abounds, for some reason this often impels people to cast about for other things to feel even more scared about.  Which is why all of a sudden I'm seeing a resurgence of interest in something I first ran into ten or so years ago -- Roko's basilisk.

Roko's basilisk is named after a guy who went by the handle Roko on the forum LessWrong, and the "basilisk," a mythical creature who could kill you at a glance.  The gist is that a superpowerful sentient AI in the future would, knowing its own past, have an awareness of all the people who had actively worked against its creation (as well as the people like me who just think the whole idea is absurd).  It would then resent those folks so much that it'd create a virtual reality simulation in which it would recreate our (current) world and torture all of the people on the list.

This, according to various YouTube videos and websites, is "the most terrifying idea anyone has ever created," because just telling someone about it means that now the person knows they should be helping to create the basilisk, and if they don't, that automatically adds them to the shit list.

Now that you've read this post, that means y'all, dear readers.  Sorry about that.

Before you freak out, though, let me go through a few reasons why you probably shouldn't.

First, notice that the idea isn't that the basilisk will reach back in time and torture the actual me; it's going to create a simulation that includes me, and torture me there.  To which I respond: knock yourself out.  This threat carries about as much weight as if I said I was going to write you into my next novel and then kill your character.  Doing this might mean I have some unresolved anger issues to work on, but it isn't anything you should be losing sleep over yourself.

Second, why would a superpowerful AI care enough about a bunch of people who didn't help build it in the past -- many of whom would probably be long dead and gone by that time -- to go to all this trouble?  It seems like it'd have far better things to expend its energy and resources on, like figuring out newer and better ways to steal the work of creative human beings without getting caught.

Third, the whole "better help build the basilisk or else" argument really is just a souped-up, high-tech version of Pascal's Wager, isn't it?  "Better to believe in God and be wrong than not believe in God and be wrong."  The problem with Pascal's Wager -- and the basilisk as well -- is the whole "which God?" objection.  After all it's not a dichotomy, but a polychotomy.  (Yes, I just made that word up.  No, I don't care). You could help build the basilisk or not, as you choose -- and the basilisk itself might end up malfunctioning, being benevolent, deciding the cost-benefit analysis of torturing you for all eternity wasn't working out in its favor, or its simply not giving a flying rat's ass who helped and who didn't.  In any of those cases, all the worry would have been for nothing.

Fourth, if this is the most terrifying idea you've ever heard of, either you have a low threshold for being scared, or else you need to read better scary fiction.  I could recommend a few titles.

On the other hand, there's always the possibility that we are already in a simulation, something I dealt with in a post a couple of years ago.  The argument is that if it's possible to simulate a universe (or at least the part of it we have access to), then within that simulation there will be sentient (simulated) beings who will go on to create their own simulations, and so on ad infinitum.  Nick Bostrom (of the University of Oxford) and David Kipping (of Columbia University) look at it statistically; if there is a multiverse of nested simulations, what's the chance of this one -- the one you, I, and unfortunately, Donald Trump belong to -- being the "base universe," the real reality that all the others sprang from?  Bostrom and Kipping say "nearly zero;" just considering that there's only one base universe, and an unlimited number of simulations, means the chances are we're in one of the simulations.

But.  This all rests on the initial conditional -- if it's possible to simulate a universe.  The processing power this would take is ginormous, and every simulation within that simulation adds exponentially to its ginormosity.  (Yes, I just made that word up.  No, I don't care.)  So, once again, I'm not particularly concerned that the aliens in the real reality will say "Computer, end program" and I'll vanish in a glittering flurry of ones and zeroes.  (At least I hope they'd glitter.  Being queer has to count for something, even in a simulation.)

On yet another hand (I've got three hands), maybe the whole basilisk thing is true, and this is why I've had such a run of ridiculously bad luck lately.  Just in the last six months, the entire heating system of our house conked out, as did my wife's van (that she absolutely has to have for art shows); our puppy needed $1,700 of veterinary care (don't worry, he's fine now); our homeowner's insurance company informed us out of the blue that if we don't replace our roof, they're going to cancel our policy; we had a tree fall down in a windstorm and take out a large section of our fence; and my laptop has been dying by inches.

So if all of this is the basilisk's doing, then... well, I guess there's nothing I can do about it, since I'm already on the Bad Guys Who Hate AI list.  In that case, I guess I'm not making it any worse by stating publicly that the basilisk can go to hell.

But if it has an ounce of compassion, can it please look past my own personal transgressions and do something about Elon Musk?  Because in any conceivable universe, fuck that guy.

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NEW!  We've updated our website, and now -- in addition to checking out my books and the amazing art by my wife, Carol Bloomgarden, you can also buy some really cool Skeptophilia-themed gear!  Just go to the website and click on the link at the bottom, where you can support your favorite blog by ordering t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, bumper stickers, and tote bags, all designed by Carol!

Take a look!  Plato would approve.

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Guest post from Andrew Butters: Devil's in the details

Before we start, what are your thoughts on calling certain people Overzealous Grammar Reporting Enthusiasts instead of Grammar Na*is?  OGREs.  I think this works.  Hereinafter, that is how I will refer to them. With that out of the way, let’s get on with it.

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I read just about everything Gordon Bonnet writes.  I read his blog, Skeptophilia, daily (well, six days a week.  He takes Sundays off.  He was also kind enough to crosspost this for me today).  Occasionally, I’ll find a typo.  When I do, I shoot him a message pointing it out, and he thanks me and then fixes it (though sometimes he fixes it and then thanks me.  Potato potato).  My response is the same when he does the same for my writing here or on Facebook.

Tyops happen.  It's not an automatic sign that the writer was negligent.  It's not irrefutable proof that self-published authors are "lesser" when compared with traditionally published ones.  I’ve seen typos in Stephen King's books and from highly respected AP journalists.  Here’s a great example of a traditional publisher thinking that global search and replace was a good idea:

Readers who come across them vary.  Some ignore them and move on.  I typically ignore them, but if I were to find a shit-tonne, I'd stop reading and send the author or publisher a private message.  No need to make a scene.  That's me, though.  Some people latch onto them as if the fate of the literary world hangs in the balance (OGREs).  Take this example:

Now, I’m told that their book was reinstated after an outpouring of support from readers, but the fact that it happened should serve as a cautionary tale.  I scooped this screenshot from someone on Facebook, and one of the comments read (in part):

“You do your job poorly, there are consequences.  That’s how it works.  And no, if there is a typo in my book I AM telling Amazon because I want my money back.”
—Some OGRE on Facebook

It took all my willpower not to point out that Grammarly suggested not one but two corrections to his comment.  At any rate, I don't blame others for piping up if the typos are rampant.  The thing is, in my experience, books like that are rare.  I've read many books from established big names to first-time self-published authors and have yet to encounter one with enough errors to raise an eyebrow.  No, the plural of anecdote isn't data, but you get my point.  Sometimes shit happens.  Welcome to being human.  Unfortunately, not everyone sees it that way.

What follows is a true story.

I wrote Near Death By A Thousand Cuts over about a month, sometime in November 2022.  After writing, I let it sit for about a week.  Then, I started editing.  These were all personal anecdotes, so I didn't approach it like I would fiction.  The language was informal, and there was more swearing.

I made three passes of editing before sending it to my actual editor, who, in this case, happened to be Gordon (a great writer in his own right and a former teacher with an MA in linguistics).  I made the changes he recommended, adding a few more.

Then, I had seven beta readers go through it (reading critically, not just for fun), and THEY found errors.

Then, my mom (a former teacher) read it and found some stuff.

Then, I read the proofcopy and found more things.

Then, upon receiving what was supposed to be the final version to upload to KDP, I got a message from my layout designer.  SHE found a typo.

Like, holy shit.  Even after all the people and all the times this book was read, there was still a missing letter ("a" should have been "an").

Then, I recorded the audiobook, and guess what? I found MORE mistakes.

All that to say, editing is hard.

I have a good mind to send a link for Near Death to the OGRE from the quote above, with their high standards, and ask them to have a go at it.  I’d even refund them their money, forgoing my royalty and Amazon’s cut.

If you find a typo in my book Known Order Girls, I’ll mail you a bookplate (normally $5).  I extended this offer on Facebook, and someone took me up on it!  They were very kind, and I appreciate their eagle eyes catching something that made it through the editing gauntlet.

There will always be some asshole typo, waiting, lurking, biding its time, and making itself known only to that one reader who will fixate on it and leave a bad review as a result.

As Vonnegut probably wrote, "So ti goes."

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