Antique ghosts

Once upon a time, there was a man who was looking for a house to buy.  He came upon a large home on a lovely piece of land, something that most would consider a mansion, at a very cheap price.  He was interested, but (understandably) suspicious -- at that price, there had to be something wrong with it.

"What's the catch?" he asked the seller.

The owner reluctantly admitted that it had a reputation for being haunted.  Everyone who had taken up residence in the house, he said, had been visited nightly by the horrifying specter of a man in chains, whose appearance was so ghastly that it made sleep pretty much impossible.  Not only that, but even when the ghost wasn't visible, there was a palpable miasma of fear around the house.  No one, the owner said, stayed there long; some had even fallen ill from the effects of the haunting.

The prospective buyer thanked the seller for his honesty, and (to the seller's shock) said he was interested in purchasing the home anyhow.  The owner, simultaneously giving thanks for his luck and questioning the buyer's sanity, sold him the house, and in due time, the transaction was completed and the new owner moved in.

Sure enough, on the first night, the man was awakened by the rattling of chains.  Soon a hideous ghost appeared, an old man dressed in ragged clothes, chains around his waist, his face pale and glowing with a sickly light.  Unmoved, the house's new owner stood his ground, and asked the spirit what he wanted.

The specter crooked one finger as if in summons, then turned away, leading the owner outside, to a place on the property.  The ghost met the owner's eyes, pointed downward -- then vanished.

The next day, the owner contacted the local magistrates, who gave the order to dig at the place the ghost had indicated.  After an hour's hard work, they uncovered a skeleton -- still bound by chains.  Who the man had been was unknown; it was obvious the body had been in the ground for a long while.  But the house's new owner made sure that the skeleton was respectfully unearthed, its fetters removed, and given a proper burial in a cemetery.

The spirit, satisfied, was never seen again.

Sound familiar?  The bare bones (pun intended) of this tale have formed the basis of hundreds, possibly thousands, of folk legends and tales-around-the-campfire.  But what may surprise you is this particular version's provenance.

It was related as a true story about the Greek philosopher Athenodorus Cananites (74 B.C.E. - 7 C.E.) by the famous author, lawyer, historian, and polymath Pliny the Younger (61 C.E. - 113 C.E.), and is one of the very first written examples of a ghost story.  Athenodorus himself was the home-buyer who allegedly sent the spirit to its eternal rest and scored a nice house and property at a bargain-basement price in the process.  (The source is Pliny's Letter LXXXIII - To Sura.)

Athenodorus Confronts the Spectre, by Henry Justice Ford (ca. 1900) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Athenodorus Cananites was neither ignorant nor superstitious; he was a prominent Stoic, learned in a variety of fields, and in fact was one of the tutors hired to teach Octavian (later Augustus Caesar).  I don't want to overstate the case, of course.  Even scholarly Greeks and Romans of his time were steeped in the legends of gods, demigods, and spirits, and mostly bought into a worldview that many of us today would consider unscientific nonsense.  But it's interesting that two prominent figures of the Classical intelligentsia are responsible for a story of with same flavor as countless other "restless spirit finds justice and is now at peace" tales told since.

It makes me wonder, though, how all of this got started.  Once the first few ghost stories are told, you can see how people would continue telling them; they're good scary fun, and also, humans are pretty suggestible.  Once your cousin tells you the house is haunted, it's easy enough afterward to interpret every creak and thump as the footsteps of a spectral resident.

But if you go back far enough, someone has to have told the first ghost story.  What could have spurred that?  What occurrence led one of our distant ancestors to decide that Great-Aunt Bertha had come back from the dead, and was still stalking around the place?

Impossible to know, of course.  But what's certain is that just about every culture on Earth tells ghost stories.  True Believers use that as an argument for their veracity; if there was no such thing as an afterlife, they say, why the ubiquity (and commonality of themes) between ghostly tales the world over?  Me, I'm not convinced.  After all, I've written here before about the widespread occurrence of stories similar to "Little Red Riding Hood" -- and no one believes that's because there ever was a wolf dressed up like Grandma waiting to eat a little girl with a basket of goodies.

At least I hope they don't.

In any case, I thought it was an interesting story, not least because it involves two prominent historical figures.  Whether it, and others like it, have any basis in reality very much remains to be seen.  So think about this if you're ever purchasing a house, and the price is way lower than it should be.  Maybe there's a man in chains buried somewhere on the property, and you're about to be recruited by a long-dead specter to fulfill its quest for justice.

Or maybe the roof just needs replacing or something.

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Stone age

I've only got a few real obsessions.  My dogs.  Doctor Who.  Anything to do with astronomy.  Lost in Space.  The X Files.  Star Trek - The Next Generation.  The movie Contact.

I bet you're sensing a theme, here.  Other than my dogs, all of these have to do with the universe, space travel, and alien life.  And given how oddly my dogs act some days, I find myself wondering if they might not be alien spies as well.  Especially Rosie, who so often seems to be judging us.

"Unless I start getting steak for dinner, the report I'll be sending to the Mothership will be highly unflattering."

But even with that possible exception, it's evident that I have a bit of a fixation on the possibility of extraterrestrial life.  I'm well aware of the fact that with regards to life, we've still got a sample size of one; despite decades of looking, we have yet to find any unequivocal biosignatures, signs that life exists, anywhere else but here.  (Much less any signs of extraterrestrial intelligent life.  Much as I would love for some astronomer to become a real-life Ellie Arroway, no such luck... yet.)

In spite of all this, I still am very much of the opinion that life elsewhere in the universe is likely to be abundant.  I base this on the known facts that there are trillions of stars out there, in billions of galaxies, and that exoplanetary systems are common (i.e. the formation of the Solar System wasn't just a lucky fluke).  Optimistic estimates of some of the other variables in the Drake Equation are harder to defend, but I stand by my statement: a purely statistical argument suggests that many star systems have planets that support some kind of life.

One of the things that in my mind argues for life existing elsewhere in the universe -- even in environments that we might consider inhospitable -- is how many extreme habitats here on Earth turn out to host living things.  There's life in the desiccated, perpetual cold of the dry valleys of Antarctica, in highly alkaline (or highly acidic) hot springs, in boreholes miles deep, in hydrothermal vents in the oceanic abyss.  The odd little animals called tardigrades can survive extremes in temperature and pressure, radiation, and dehydration; they've even survived exposure to the vacuum of space.

And we're still finding new ones in unexpected places.  Take, for example, the microorganism -- or, rather, the traces of it -- that was the subject of a study this week in the journal Geomicrobiology.  A team out of Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz was studying samples of marble and limestone quarried in the parched deserts of Namibia, Oman, and Saudi Arabia, and found microscopic tunnels apparently excavated by some as-yet-unidentified microbe.

"We were surprised because these tubes are clearly not the result of a geological process," said Cees Passchier, who co-authored the paper.  "We were looking at the structure of the rocks to find out how continents came together to form the supercontinent Gondwana five hundred to six hundred million years ago.  At that time, carbonate deposits formed in the ancient oceans and turned into marble due to pressure and heat...  We noticed strange structures in this marble that were not the result of geological events.  These are old structures, perhaps one or two million years old...  What is so exciting about our discovery is that we do not know which endolithic microorganism this is.  Is it a known form of life or a completely unknown organism?  It must be an organism that can survive without light because the tubes have formed deep inside the rock.  We don't currently know whether this is a life form that has become extinct or is still alive somewhere."

Samples of marble with the "microburrows" [Image credit: C. Passchier et al.]

It seems like everywhere we look on Earth, we find life, which strengthens the hope of those of us who'd like to find life out there amongst the stars as well.  That microorganisms can live by tunneling their way through solid rock certainly suggests we should expand the parameters of the phrase "capable of supporting life."

Although most of it may not be at the point of sending out messages that could be picked up by our radio telescopes, my surmise is that most even remotely hospitable locales in the universe will turn out to be inhabited.  And just judging by the diversity of our terrestrial organisms, I also strongly suspect that what is out there will indeed turn out to be, in Darwin's immortal words, "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful."

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Up, down, round and round

I recall seeing a comic strip a while back making fun of one of the features of Star Trek that doesn't seem ridiculous until you think about it a little.  Have you noticed that whenever two starships are near each other -- whether it's the Enterprise and other Federation ships, or they're being threatened by the Romulans or Klingons or whatnot -- the ships are almost always oriented the same way?  The only time this is not the case is when the showrunner wanted to make it clear that the other ship was disabled and drifting.  Then it was shown at some odd angle relative to the Enterprise.  In the comic strip, it showed what it would look like if all the ships were at random orientations -- how ridiculous it appeared -- but really, isn't that what you'd expect?  In the Star Trek universe, each ship is supposed to come with its own artificial gravity, so within any ship, up is "toward the ceiling" and down is "toward the floor."  It wouldn't need to line up with any other ship's artificial gravity, so except for an occasional coincidence, they should all be at various angles.

In space, there's no preferred direction, no "up" or "down."  You always have to describe position relative to something else -- to the axis of the Earth's rotation, or the plane of the Solar System, or the plane of revolution of the Milky Way.  But even those aren't some kind of universal orientation; as I described in a recent post, the universe is largely isotropic (the same in every direction).  Just like the starships in Star Trek, there shouldn't be any preferred directionality.

Well, that's what we thought.

A new paper this week in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society describes a set of data from the James Webb Space Telescope that is absolutely astonishing.  Here's how the authors describe it:

JWST provides a view of the Universe never seen before, and specifically fine details of galaxies in deep space.  JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) is a deep field survey, providing unprecedentedly detailed view of galaxies in the early Universe.  The field is also in relatively close proximity to the Galactic pole.  Analysis of spiral galaxies by their direction of rotation in JADES shows that the number of galaxies in that field that rotate in the opposite direction relative to the Milky Way galaxy is ∼50 per cent higher than the number of galaxies that rotate in the same direction relative to the Milky Way.  The analysis is done using a computer-aided quantitative method, but the difference is so extreme that it can be noticed and inspected even by the unaided human eye.  These observations are in excellent agreement with deep fields taken at around the same footprint by Hubble Space Telescope and JWST.

This adds a whole new twist (*rimshot*) to the horizon problem and the isotropy of the universe as a whole.  Not only do we have the issue that causally-disconnected regions of the cosmic microwave background radiation, that are too far apart to have ever influenced each other (something I describe more fully in the above-linked post), are way more similar in temperature than you'd expect -- now we have to figure out how causally-disconnected galaxies on opposite sides of the universe could possibly have ended up with correlated rotational axes.

The authors admit it's possible that this measurement is due to something about the Milky Way's own rotation that we're not compensating for in the data, but there's a more out-there explanation that the paper's authors are seriously considering.

"It is not clear what causes this to happen," said study co-author Lior Shamir, of Kansas State University, in an interview with Independent.  "[But] one explanation is that the universe was born rotating.  That explanation agrees with theories such as black hole cosmology, which postulates that the entire universe is the interior of a black hole."

Black holes are defined by three properties -- mass, electric charge, and... angular momentum.  That we're inside a rotating black hole would explain the anomaly JWST just observed.  Since -- at least as far as our current understanding goes -- anything inside a black hole's event horizon is forever inaccessible, perhaps this means that event horizons are boundaries between universes.  As bizarre as that sounds, there is nothing about what we know of the laws of physics and cosmology that rules that out.  Which would mean that...

... black holes are bigger on the inside.

The Doctor tried to tell us.

Of course, the more prosaic explanation -- that the data were somehow influenced by our own motion through space -- has yet to be decisively ruled out.  I can't help but feel, though, that if the authors thought that was likely, they (or their reviewers) would have suggested waiting and re-analyzing before publishing in a prestigious journal like MNRAS.  The greater likelihood is that this is a real signal, and if so, it's mighty odd.

As far as what it would mean if we found out we are inside a black hole, well -- I'm hardly qualified to weigh in.  It probably wouldn't affect our day-to-day life any.  After all, it's not like we were going to find a way out of the universe anyhow, much as recent events here on Earth have made many of us wish we could.  All I can say is stay alert for further developments, and keep looking up.

Whatever direction that actually is.

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Bootstraps

Yesterday's post, about the strange resurgence of a fifty-year-old claim that the Dogon tribe of west Africa found out about Sirius's invisible-to-the-naked-eye white dwarf companion star from space-traveling aliens, spurred a conversation with a friend about the nature of the internet.

As useful as it is -- many of us spend a significant fraction of our waking hours connected to it -- it has its downsides.  I had made the point in yesterday's post that stuff like "E.T. Visits the Dogon People" would never gain the traction, spread, and longevity that it does without the internet.  The web is a fantastic conduit for knowledge, an amazing repository for factual information -- and a dreadfully efficient facilitator for the distribution of bullshit.

My friend, though, went one step further.

"The way the internet is set up," he said, "it not only acts as a conductor for bullshit, but it actually creates it.  There's a self-referential quality to the internet that makes the generation of loony nonsense inevitable.  It's why I wasn't surprised when generative A.I. started 'hallucinating' -- basically, making shit up that sounded so plausible that people believed it, like the A.I. mushroom foraging guide that recommended eating Amanita mushrooms with your t-bone steak.  It takes almost nothing to get the ball rolling, and pretty soon you've got some serious craziness to deal with.  Then, once it starts, how do you get people to stop believing?  Their belief expands the craziness, and around and around it goes.  It's the snowball effect on steroids."

I asked him if he could give me some examples, and he said he'd send me some links.

The result sent me down a rabbit hole, which I'll share a bit of with you here.

One of the most persistent and long-lived examples of this phenomenon is one I had never heard of before.  It's called Markovian Parallax Denigrate, after the subject line of hundreds of messages posted to Usenet all the way back in 1996.  The message texts were a random list of words, such as the following real example:

jitterbugging McKinley Abe break Newtonian inferring caw update Cohen air collaborate rue sportswriting rococo invocate tousle shadflower Debby Stirling pathogenesis escritoire adventitious novo ITT most chairperson Dwight Hertzog different pinpoint dunk McKinley pendant firelight Uranus episodic medicine ditty craggy flogging variac brotherhood Webb impromptu file countenance inheritance cohesion refrigerate morphine napkin inland Janeiro nameable yearbook hark

Well, it's a seemingly random list.  *raises one eyebrow in a meaningful manner*  Even though most people believe that the MPD messages are nonsense and were either produced by an early experimental text generator or chatbot, or else someone trying to troll everyone and get their fifteen minutes of fame, there are people who are still trying to "decode" the messages and figure out what they "really mean."  After everyone got all stirred up, it seemed so damned anticlimactic to say they were just a list of words.  Interestingly, no one has ever claimed responsibility; an article on The Daily Dot called it "the internet's oldest and weirdest mystery."

Then there's Cicada 3301, a set of seven puzzles posted between 2012 and 2014 on the weird, conspiracy-ish site 4chan.  The first two puzzles were solved; the others remain unsolved (and there are still people working on them today).  The stated purpose of the puzzles was to "recruit intelligent individuals," but for whom or what?  Various people suggested the source of the puzzles (and therefore the recruiting agency) could be the CIA, the NSA, M16, Mossad, a free-agent mercenary group, or a "Masonic conspiracy." 

One person who successfully solved the first puzzle was invited to join a private forum, where he was questioned about his knowledge of cryptography and his attitudes toward online freedom and censorship.  He played along for a while, but eventually got spooked and quit the forum -- and later inquiries found that the site itself had been deleted.

To this day no one knows for sure who Cicada 3301 is or what the website's purpose was -- but there's still an online community of people discussing it, over a decade later.

The best example of something on the internet taking on a life of its own, though, is "This Man."  Back in 2008, a website popped up called "Ever Dreamed Of This Man?"  It was accompanied by a sketch:

Along with the image was a story about a "well-known New York City psychiatrist" whose patient reported seeing "This Man" repeatedly in his dreams; when a second patient came to him with a similar tale, the psychiatrist forwarded the sketch to colleagues, and found that a number of them had patients with recurring dreams about the guy -- some neutral, some sexual, some violent.  In some dreams he was the dreamer's father; in others, a teacher; in many of them, he was a stranger.  The one common thread was his appearance -- and the extreme vividness with which people recalled him.

Well, responses started pouring in.  Thousands of people reported dreaming about him, and posted lengthy descriptions of what they'd experienced.  How could this be -- how could people from all over the world suddenly find themselves dreaming about the same man?  Who was the mysterious man, and what could it mean that he was appearing in dreaming minds worldwide?

As you might already be suspecting, the whole tale had been a lie right from the get-go.  There was no "well-known New York City psychiatrist," and the entire set-up of the story was a hoax.  It had all been the brainchild of an Italian online marketer named Andrea Natella to get clicks on his website, and to drum up notoriety for a marketing campaign.  

The responses, however, were very real.  Even when Natella more or less got caught at his game and confessed in 2008, people kept saying they'd dreamed about This Man, and No he's real really he is.  Natella was interviewed by Vice in 2015, and described the whole thing -- how he'd gotten the idea, how he'd been found out, and so on -- and despite that, he is still receiving hundreds of emails and letters every week from people who claim to have dreamed about This Man -- or, weirder still, to have seen him in real life.  A few claim to know who he actually is.  (And we reach weirdvana with an Indian guru named Arud Kannan Ayya, who contacted Natella to tell him that he is This Man and that's why he has magical guru powers.)

So even shouting "HEY Y'ALL I ADMIT IT I MADE THE WHOLE THING UP" isn't enough to put the quietus on this phenomenon. Once it starts up, it's like these online claims lift themselves by their own bootstraps, and at that point they're unstoppable.  And I have to admit that my friend has a point; without the internet, it's hard to imagine how any of these could have gotten the traction they did.

In any case, we're pretty well stuck with the internet, for good or bad, at least until the next Miyake Event comes along and blows the whole thing to smithereens.  Myself, I'll put up with stuff like This Man, Cicada 3301, and Markovian Parallax Denigrate rather than having to deal with the aftermath of that.

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The zombie claim

One of the fundamental principles of woo-woo-ism is never to let a popular idea die.

You can refute them, you can debunk them, you can show them hard cold facts that what they're saying can't be true, and they will never give up.  It's a little like Donald "It's Only Rigged When I Lose" Trump, isn't it?  The world has to be how they see it, so any evidence to the contrary has to be suppressed, rationalized away, or simply ignored.

This is undoubtedly why I am once again running across references to a claim that I first saw way back in the 1970s -- that the Dogon tribe of Africa had prior knowledge, through contact with "ancient astronauts" from another planet, that the star Sirius has a companion star that is too small to see with the naked eye.  According to this story, they even got the orbital period of this star correct (fifty years, give or take).  Aficionados of UFOs and aliens and so on just love this story, because if true, it would seem to be evidence that a relatively primitive tribe had information that they could only have gotten from an advanced society.

Of course, that last statement is literally true; the advanced society they got it from is France.  The anthropologist who first made the claim of the Dogon's knowledge, Marcel Griaule, is thought to be the one who "contaminated" the Dogon with outside information in the first place.  The discovery that Sirius's companion star ("Sirius B") is a bizarre condensed stellar core called a white dwarf was all over the news in the 1920s, when Griaule was working with the Dogon, and the Dogon themselves are peculiarly fascinated with the stars.  It doesn't take much of a reach to guess that Griaule was the source of the information, especially given that subsequent researchers into the Dogon culture found that the only ones who had actually heard of "po tolo," as they called Sirius B, were the people in the village Griaule had visited.

Sirius A and Sirius B [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]

Griaule's claim probably would never have gotten much notice if it hadn't been for a 1977 book by Robert Temple called The Sirius Mystery, which rode on the then-recent hype surrounding Erich von Däniken's 1968 smash bestseller Chariots of the Gods, followed by his equally popular books Gold of the Gods, Odyssey of the Gods, Signs of the Gods, Return of the Gods, Retirement Planning Advice of the Gods, and Favorite Easy Recipes of the Gods.  Temple's book covers much of the same sort of ground, and garnered highly dubious responses by Carl Sagan, Jason Colavito, James Oberg, and Ian Ridpath, the latter of whom wrote a thorough takedown of the claim in The Skeptical Inquirer in 1978.  Ridpath shows that to accept that the Dogon somehow knew about Sirius B requires taking their vague, ambiguous, and mythologized accounts (as related by Griaule) and forcing them to conform to the data.  It's more likely -- vastly more likely -- that the Dogon heard bits and pieces about the discovery of the double star from Griaule or one of his staff and incorporated them into their own legends in a piecemeal fashion, than that they somehow got the information from space travelers who'd actually been there.

Ridpath writes:

The point is that there are any number of channels by which the Dogon could have received Western knowledge long before they were visited by Griaule and [Germaine] Dieterlen [an anthropologist who worked with Griaule].  We may never be able to reconstruct the exact route by which the Dogon received their current knowledge, but out of the confusion at least one thing is clear: they were not told by beings from the star Sirius.

Nonetheless, almost fifty years after Ridpath's authoritative takedown, this story is still circulating.  A search for the keywords "Sirius" and "Dogon" garners thousands of hits, and a quick perusal of the first three pages is enough to demonstrate that almost all of them buy Griaule's idea wholesale.  And this points to another, and more depressing conclusion; skeptical thought seems to travel slower than bullshit does.  Ridiculous ideas, like Griaule's claim that ancient astronauts had visited the Dogon, have more of a cachet than do prosaic statements such as "Griaule told 'em himself, and then claimed he'd discovered something amazing."  Who would be motivated to tell a friend something like the latter?  While the former... well, you can see how that story might have a little more tendency to get passed along.

As far as why these things go in cycles, and why there's been a recent resurgence of interest in Sirius and the Dogon -- I have no idea.  The claim this time seems to have been picked up by the Harmonic Convergence people, who think that our current turbulent political situation is an indication that we're about to "ascend" and meet up with Cosmic Masters from another star system.  "Pain and anguish always precede profound change for the better," I saw on one of their websites.  To which I say: cool beans.  All I can add is that y'all Cosmic Masters need to get your ascended celestial asses here pronto, because our current so-called leaders seem to be fucking things up royally.  At this point, I'd look upon an invasion by aliens as an improvement.  I mean, I'm not asking for the Daleks or the Vashta Nerada to show up -- I do have some standards -- but there are a lot of other options.  Even the Borg have their positive aspects, you know?

But since the Borg are a collective interconnected hive-mind, this brings up the question of what would happen if some of these MAGA types got assimilated.  Suppose they Borg-ified Marjorie Taylor Greene.  Would the Collective all of a sudden become way stupider?  After assimilating Mike Johnson they'd probably stop trying to take over new planets and focus on taking away the rights of the ones they'd already assimilated, and then they'd hold a prayer meeting.  Or how about J. D. Vance?  Would they all suddenly develop a strange affinity for sofas?

But I digress.

Anyhow, if you do see the whole Dogon/Sirius B thing popping up, like some undead zombie claim we all thought was long buried, you might want to mention that it was thoroughly debunked all the way back in 1978.  There aren't any Ancient Astronauts, so claiming that they visited a tribe in Africa is even further removed from the truth.

It's time to let this one go, at least for now.  I'm not enough of an optimist to believe it'll ever go away completely, but for now, let's give it a rest, okay?

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Resonant nonsense

One of the problems with targeted-advertisement algorithms is that they're awfully good at picking up on words like "homeopathy" and "crystal healing" and "chemtrails" and not so good a picking up on words like "bollocks" and "lunacy" and "absolute horseshit."

The result is that my work here at Skeptophilia leaves me foundering in a sea of wingnuttery.  The "Recommended For You" pages I get on Facebook are particularly bad, especially given that these days, the way Facebook works is you get twenty "Sponsored" and "Recommended" posts for every one that's from an actual friend, so trying to find out what's going on with your pals requires wading through all the stuff Mark Zuckerberg thinks you desperately need to see but almost certainly would prefer not to.

This is the only possible explanation for how Facebook ended up recommending a page to me called "Schumann Resonance Today."  Those of you who are aficionados of obscure atmospheric phenomena probably know that the Schumann resonances are the resonant radio frequencies of the atmosphere -- similar to how a plucked guitar string has a natural frequency it "wants" to oscillate at (corresponding to the pitch you hear when you pluck it).  Just like the guitar string needs something to set it in motion, the Schumann resonances do, too; in this case, lightning.  Lightning releases not only light and heat and compression waves (sound), but radio waves, and it turns out that those at 7.83 Hertz have the right wavelength to resonate and form a standing wave in the upper atmosphere.  (Once again similar to a guitar string, the atmosphere also has "overtones" -- progressively weaker harmonics at 14.3, 20.8, 27.3, and 33.8 Hertz.)

And that's all they are.  Nothing mystical, nothing that has any effect on humans.  In fact, they weren't even discovered until 1952.

But then you look at the "Schumann Resonance Today" page on Facebook, and... well, let me give you a taste of it.

Each post starts with a graph that looks like this:

And a headline like "WARNING: THE SCHUMANN RESONANCE HAS EXPLODED!!!" followed by "Rolling blackouts expected!  We warned you this was coming!"

If you look at the comments section (Not directly!  Always wear eye protection!) you find out that literally hundreds of people have noticed the explosion of the Schumman resonance, because they report:

• having insomnia
• sleeping way more than usual
• having tons of nervous energy
• having no energy at all
• more "glitches in the matrix" than usual
• fewer "glitches in the matrix" than usual
• pets acting weird

As far as the last-mentioned, I don't know about your pets, but my pets kind of act weird 24/7/365.  In fact, I'd notice it if they stopped acting weird.  Just yesterday morning, I heard "BANG (whimper) BANG (whimper) BANG" so I got up to go see what was going on.  Turns out it had started to rain and Jethro wanted to come inside, and he wanted to bring along his favorite stick, but when it was in his mouth he didn't fit through the doggy door.  So his solution after three or four unsuccessful tries was to sit on the patio in the rain and feel sorry for himself until I came downstairs and rescued him.

But I digress.

Anyhow, the Schumann resonance people are deadly serious that a standing radio wave in the upper atmosphere is somehow impacting their lives.  Here are a few selected comments, which I swear I am not making up:

This full moon and static air has me AWAKE.  I have been manic for a week now.

I’m sleeping deep; inward struggles (46+ years worth due to severe trauma) have been lifted; I’m more focused, hopeful, and optimistic; I feel a spine chilling shift in my spirituality and empathic abilities (ascending) … plus so much more! I’m eternally grateful

Grounding & aligning your central axis with the earth’s supports the integration of the energy

I woke up too early yesterday and then slept great last night. Ringing in my ears in different tones at different times and in different ears. Some days it's more prevalent than others. I guess it's a roller coaster for all of us

These vibrational frequencies affect some people more than others.  Sometimes the answer is increasing your own vibration out of the range of the resonance.  If that doesn't work, sleeping on a grounding sheet can help. 

Has ANYONE noticed there [sic] certain gifts they have, they have gotten stronger?  I play a game with cards, I put a few down and try n guess what’s there.  I’ve been playing around with it bcuz I feel myself smarter?  Every time I pick one I have been spot on.  Anyone else notice lil differences that are big ?

I got a beautiful flash premonition of my next step to my higher life, I received a download that shows me my path.  It was a beautiful experience.

Can someone explain to me what this means?  And if it means it’s time to buy an another gun?

Oh dear lord no please don't buy another gun.  And as far as the rest of you people -- well, I'm happy for your ascending empathic abilities and flash premonitions of higher lives and whatnot, but whatever it is you're experiencing has nothing to with standing radio waves.

And for what it's worth, you're not going to get anywhere by listening to a sound at a frequency of 7.83 Hertz, which I also saw recommended, because sound waves and radio waves aren't the same thing.  And incidentally, "raising the frequencies" is not necessarily a good thing.  If you think "high frequencies = good, low frequencies = bad," how 'bout you listen to a piccolo for three hours and I listen to a cello for three hours, and we'll see which one of us comes away with a splitting headache.

Lest you think this stuff is just the province of a few scattered woo-woos, the "Schumann Resonance Today" page has fifteen thousand followers, and their posts average between six hundred and a thousand likes each.  It'd be comforting to think that some of these are people who follow the page simply for the humor value, but after looking at the comments, I'm forced to the conclusion that the vast majority of these folks are True Believers.

I find this colossally frustrating.  To learn what the Schumann resonances are -- and how (frankly) prosaic the phenomenon is -- all you have to do is read the post on Skeptoid I linked above, which was the first non-woo hit I found after a fifteen-second Google search; failing that, just read the damn Wikipedia article.  Both are clear about how the resonances work, that they have nothing to do with human health, and that all of the "Resonances EXPLODED" stuff is utter nonsense.

So I'm forced to the conclusion that this isn't only an example of superstition, pseudoscience, and confirmation bias, it's an example of laziness.  The answers, the real answers, are out there; and -- unlike, for example, quantum physics -- in this case the actual science isn't even that hard to understand.  There is no excuse for falling for this kind of foolishness, not with the access we now have to real, factual knowledge.

I'll end with an exhortation to all of us to get out there and learn some damn science before we start posting stuff on social media.  And as far as the Facebook algorithms -- get your fucking act together.  Seems like after thirteen years of writing Skeptophilia, y'all'd have figured out that recommending pages like this to me is seriously barking up the wrong tree.

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Ill-starred

I've never believed in luck.  It's true, however, that life is full of caprices.  Although the laws of physics are rigorously enforced in all jurisdictions, the bigger picture often seems to be chaotic.  I think a lot of people put too much stock in superstitious beliefs about good (or bad) luck; I much more tend to agree with Thomas Jefferson, who famously said, "I've found that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have."

Still, sometimes you read about what some people have gone through, and you can't help coming away with the feeling that the stars must have been misaligned when they were born.  Their lives are just one disaster after another -- and I choose the word deliberately, because disaster comes from Latin words meaning "bad stars," and the specific example I'm thinking of was an eighteenth-century French astronomer who just could not catch a break.

His full name was Guillaume Joseph Hyacinthe Jean-Baptiste Le Gentil de la Galeisière, but historians of science know him as Guillaume Le Gentil.  He was born in September of 1725 in Coutances, and was inspired to study astronomy after hearing a lecture by the famous astronomer, cartographer, and world traveler Joseph-Nicolas Delisle.  After receiving his bachelor's degree in the subject, he threw himself into research with great gusto.  He discovered the Pinwheel Cluster (Messier 36), the Starfish Cluster (Messier 38), and a dark nebula in the constellation Cygnus that is now called Le Gentil 3 in his honor.

The Pinwheel Cluster [Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of the 2 Micron All-Sky Survey]

Just about everything else he attempted, however, was... a disaster.

In 1760, Russian polymath Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonsov came up with a method for refining the length of the Astronomical Unit (A.U.), the distance between the Earth and the Sun, by making careful measurements from various locations of the transit of Venus -- the apparent movement of the silhouette of Venus across the face of the Sun at the point when the Earth, Venus, and the Sun are all lined up.  Le Gentil, who had already done some work on this question, joined the French team working on the project, and was dispatched to Pondicherry, India, then a French colonial possession, where he'd been given permission by the king to set up an observatory.

Before Le Gentil's ship could get him there, though, the Seven Years' War broke out.  As different parts of India, and the islands of the Indian Ocean, were under the control of France and Britain, and those were on opposite sides of the conflict, ship travel in the region was iffy at best.  Le Gentil got stranded on Mauritius, and had a hell of a time finding anyone who would get him to India in time for the transit (6 June 1761).  He finally found a frigate whose captain said he'd get him to Coromandel, India, and from there Le Gentil could get another ship to Pondicherry in plenty of time -- but the first ship was first blown off course for five weeks, and then by the time they got to Coromandel they found out that Pondicherry had been taken by the British and they weren't allowing any French citizens to land there.

So Le Gentil had no choice but to return to Mauritius.  The transit took place while he was on board ship -- the weather was clear, but the seas were so rough and the ship pitching so wildly that he couldn't take any measurements from on board.

No worries, Le Gentil thought; because of the geometry of the orbits of Earth and Venus, Venusian transits come in pairs, eight years apart.  (Each pair, though, is separated by over a century.)  He decided to try and get measurements for the 1769 transit in Manila, Philippines, but the Spanish authorities weren't keen, so he went back to giving a go at Pondicherry again, which had been returned to French control in 1763.  He got there in 1768, built a special observatory to do his measurements, got everything ready...

... then the day of the transit, the clouds rolled in.

He was now zero for two.

Licking his wounds, he decided to return to France, but fate wasn't done yet.  The crew and passengers of his ship were struck by dysentery, and forced to put in on Réunion Island so they could recover.  (And, presumably, clean the ship.)  While in port, the ship was damaged in a storm and declared un-seaworthy, so once again he was stranded.  Finally he found a Spanish ship that was willing to take him home, and he arrived home in Paris in October of 1771, eleven years after he'd left for what was supposed to be an absence of a year or so.

When he got there, he found that much like Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit, he'd been declared legally dead.  Not a single one of the letters he'd sent home during his voyage had arrived.  His wife had remarried, his estate had been plundered, and his seat at the Royal Academy of Sciences given to someone else.  He ended up in court for years trying to (1) prove he was actually still alive and wasn't an impostor, (2) get some of his belongings back, and (3) get re-appointed to the Academy.  (Eventually the king himself had to intervene to force the Academy to accept him again -- and also, to allow him to remarry without being guilty of bigamy.)

What's most remarkable about Le Gentil is that he seems to have lived up to his name (gentil is French for "friendly" or "kind").  He wrote a memoir with the cumbersome title Voyage dans les mers de l'Inde, fait par ordre du Roi, à l'occasion du passage de Vénus, sur le disque du Soleil, le 6 juin 1761 & le 3 du même mois 1769 par M. Le Gentil, de l'académie royale des sciences ("Voyage to the Indian Ocean, by Order of the King, for the Occasion of the Passage of Venus Across the Disk of the Sun, 6 June 1761 and the 3rd of the Same Month 1769, by Monsieur Le Gentil, of the Royal Academy of Sciences").  In it, you very much get the impression that Le Gentil had an "Oh, well, ha-ha, that's the way it goes" attitude toward all of his troubles; he never does what I would have done after the second setback, which is to scream "For fuck's sake, what now?" and start throwing heavy objects.

Guillaume Le Gentil died in Paris in October of 1792, at the age of 67.  This, in fact, might have been the best stroke of luck he ever had; he missed by only a few months the start of the horrific Reign of Terror, which -- to judge by the fate of poor, doomed Antoine Lavoisier -- had little respect for scientists.

Reading about Le Gentil's life, you have to wonder how one person could have such continual misfortune.  It reminds me of the line from Calvin & Hobbes, where Calvin's mom tells him, "Life is unfair," and Calvin responds, "I know, but why can't it ever be unfair in my favor?"  It sure seems like Le Gentil was on the receiving end of way too many bad turns of fate.  Even if I don't attribute it to his literally being ill-starred from birth, I can't help but feel a combination of pity and admiration for someone who kept doggedly persevering despite just about everything going wrong.

And maybe his tale of woe will also put things into perspective next time you think you're having a bad day.

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