Send in the clones

You've all heard about the whole Reptilian Alien thing, right?  That prominent individuals, especially world leaders but also including a lot of entertainers, are actually aliens in human suits?  

Well, I can go you one better.  Many of those prominent individuals aren't aliens, they're actually cleverly-wrought doubles.  Clones.  Twins from different mothers, as it were.

And this highly compelling scientific claim just got a boost a couple of days ago from Mr. Grip-On-Reality himself: Donald Trump.

Trump shared the following post on the ironically-named Truth Social:

The text, in case the image doesn't load well, says, "There is no #JoeBiden - executed in 2020.  #Biden clone doubles & robotic engineered soulless mindless entities are what you see.  >#Democrats don't know the difference.  #Steel #ussteel #MAGA #MAHA"

When I first saw this, I thought, "Surely this has to be fake.  Even Trump isn't crazy enough to share something this stupid."

Being hopeful these days is a losing proposition.  It's quite real, and was even reported on Fox News, which has usually taken great pains to depict Dear Leader as the smartest person in the world now that Stephen Hawking is dead, instead of the reality, which is that Trump was pretty fucking dumb to begin with and in the last few years has shown every sign of progressive dementia.

The thing is, the whole "replaced by clones" claim isn't new, although this is the first time I've heard it espoused by Trump (or applied to Biden).  I did a little bit of research on the topic, at the expense of brain cells I can ill afford to lose, and discovered there's a Doppelgänger and Identity Research Society which keeps track of this alleged phenomena.  And they're not talking about simply spotting someone who looks a bit like a famous person, or perhaps resembles yourself (an unsettling occurrence that happens to just about everyone once or twice in their lives).  These people claim that unlike ordinary twins, or even clones, in which both individuals coexist, here the duplicate has replaced the original, and the original is no more.

In other words: Brad Pitt isn't actually Brad Pitt, he's someone who looks, talks, and acts exactly like Brad Pitt.

Upon reading this, I was reminded of the quote from Spock on Star Trek: "A difference that makes no difference is no difference."  If there's only one Brad Pitt -- i.e., no one is really claiming that there are two of 'em walking around, as far as I can see -- and he is identical to Brad Pitt, doesn't that make him, um, Brad Pitt?

Apparently not.  Here's an explanation of the difference, from the site:

Human doubles are made by other humans from the DNA of a single cell, where a replica of the physical body is reproduced.  That clone is only physical and has no soul, therefore, it has no God-connection.  Clones can mate and reproduce clone children.  A clone and a souled-human can mate and, again, only reproduce clone children.

Humans have no means to create a soul in another human clone, therefore, human clones have no soul and no concept of right and wrong, no conscience and no compassion.  They have survival instinct and are greatly concerned about their own death, but not the welfare and death of others.

This explains why so many people today have no values, no morals, no ethics and are prone to violence. 

They are more easily programmed through our mind-control type education and military training than are souled-humans with a freewill.  Clones have no freewill, only a sense of survival, and will act accordingly through conditioned behavior.

The eye is the window of the soul.  In the eye of another souled-human you can sense the Light emanating from the soul, the God Spirit within.  As I said earlier, soul or God Spirit within, so there is no God-connection to the eternal Light of Creator Source.  Therefore, there is no the human clone has no spiritual discernment.  The eyes of a human clone may appear dull, blank, hollow, dark, vacant, lifeless, empty with no vibrancy or Light. They have no reaction to or understanding of spiritual energy, concepts or conversation.

Well, the first thing that jumps out at me is that a "person with blank, dead eyes who has no concept of right or wrong, no compassion, no values, no morals, no ethics, and no care about the welfare of others" is a far better description of Donald Trump than it is of Joe Biden.  Be that as it may, the whole protocol for telling apart clones from real people seems pretty... subjective.  Even the website admits that the synthetic humans are just like regular humans, down to the genetic level, even though their science seems a little sketchy in other respects:

Certain tissues extracted from cattle are the starting point.  (This is part of the reason for cattle mutilations.)  The process is an advancement of a process discovered in the late 1950s.  This 1959 experiment was reported in a book in 1968 called The Biological Time Bomb by Gordon Rettray Taylor.  Taylor describes the experiment done in France, "They had extracted DNA from the cells of the khaki Campbells and had injected it into the white Pekins, thinking that just possibly the offspring of the latter might show some character derived from khaki Campbells.  To their astonishment the actual ducks they injected began to change.  Their white feathers darkened, and their necks began to take on the peculiar curve which is a mark of the khaki Campbell."  The scientists working under the auspices of the Rothschilds, (who are directed by Satan himself) developed this process by working at secret breakneck speed. T hey developed an advanced development of the process they discovered with the DNA chicken experiment. By the late 1970’s, synthetic people could be produced by the Illuminati.

So you have to mutilate cattle to get tissue samples instead of just buying a package of ground beef at the grocery store, ducks are the same thing as chickens, the Rothschilds are directed by Satan, and therefore there are bunches of synthetic soulless people walking around.  Got it.

Apparently, though, that's not all.  Not only do we have fake people walking around, but as Trump mentioned in his post some of them are actually robots.  Jimmy Carter was one, for example:

Organic robotoids: This is an "artificial life" form that is created through processes that are totally different than cloning or synthetics.  Organic robotoid technology is being made to make exact as possible copies of important people such as Presidents and some of their staff.  For instance, the Jimmy Carter who came to Portland a few years ago who I stood two feet away from and examined visually was not the Jimmy Carter that had run for President.  On Easter, 1979 the first robotoid model of Jimmy Carter replaced the man Jimmy Carter.  By the time "Carter" was seen by me, they must have been on at least robotoid no. 100.

Myself, I'm surprised that anyone who visually examined a former president of the United States from two feet away wasn't immediately escorted from the premises by men in dark suits and sunglasses.  But I guess he was lucky.  Or maybe it was just because the Dark Suits knew that if something happened to Jimmy Carter Version 100, they could always replace him with Version 101.

The site provides hours of bizarre exploration, wherein we find out that not only are Joe Biden and Brad Pitt synthetic humans, or clones, or robotoids, or whatnot, so are:

• Cameron Diaz
• Bob Dylan
• Angelina Jolie (figures, since Brad is, right?)
• Christina Aguilera
• Beyoncé (I thought she was an Illuminatus herself?  C'mon, people, get your story straight)
• Eddie Murphy
• Courteney Cox
• David Icke

The last one made me choke-snort coffee all over my computer, because David Icke is one of the people who is always supposedly blowing the whistle on the Illuminati and the New World Order and the Bilderburg Group and what-have-you, and now we learn that he's not really David Icke, he's someone else who not only looks just like David Icke, but also has David Icke's loony views of how the world works?  Evidently so:

David Icke got replaced 2007 by a synthetic clone.  We... did a lot of mathematic facial geometry analysis and other stuff.  Also we found out that the new David Icke has no birthmarks anymore in his face, a lot bigger shoulders and his hands have a different geometry.  Also the way he use his muscles of the face, shoulders and hands, even the fingers and mostly the eyes and the bigger nose with its different form is a proof.  Also the different color of his skin.  Its [sic] a very fine difference of the color.  Also the distance between body and head is now different.  Also his psychology while talking.  We did a very deep analysis of a lot famous people and we are experts for doing this.  We work all together and are as objective as possible.

Well, there you are, then. They did lots of "stuff" and found out that (amongst other things) David Icke's head has moved farther away from his body.  Plus, they say they're being objective, so pretty much q.e.d., as far as I can tell.  You can see why Trump found this such an appealing idea.  I mean, who wouldn't?  The logic is inescapable.

So, anyway, that's today's dip in the deep end of the pool, thanks to yet another brilliant missive from the Leader of the Free World.  Me, I'm going to get a second cup of coffee, so I can appear less vacant and hollow-eyed, and hopefully trick more people into thinking I'm actually Gordon.  Well, I am Gordon, but not the real Gordon.  I'm the Gordon who looks like Gordon.

Never mind.  You know what I mean.  At least I'm sure I'll fool the Democrats.

****************************************

Moon madness

There's a general rule that once a lie gets out into wide circulation, trying to replace it with the truth is damn near impossible.  We've seen lots of examples of that here at Skeptophilia -- chemtrails, the HAARP conspiracy, the whole "vaccines cause autism" thing, and "Pizzagate" come to mind immediately.  No matter how thoroughly these are debunked, they never seem to die.  In fact, legislation in my home state of Louisiana to "ban chemtrails" just passed in the state House of Representatives.  It was sponsored by Kim Landry Coates (R-Ponchatoula).  When Coates was asked what chemicals were allegedly in these "chemtrails," she responded, I shit you not, "Barium.  There is a few, some with long words that I can’t pronounce."

Which illustrates another general principle, which is that there is no intelligence criterion for being elected to public office.

This is not a new problem, much as the Trump administration has cornered the market on egregious lies in the last few years.  Humans have always been credulous, and once convinced of a lie, unconvincing someone is the very definition of an uphill struggle.  Take, for example, the Great Moon Hoax of 1835.

In August of 1835, writers at The Sun (a New York City newspaper, not the British tabloid of the same name) dreamed up a scheme to boost circulation -- a hoax article (complete with illustrations) claiming that astronomers had spotted life on the Moon.  The discovery, they said, was made using "an immense telescope of an entirely new principle," with a lens that measured eight meters in diameter and weighed seven metric tons.  Using this, the researchers were able to see living things on the Moon, including bat-winged humanoids the scientists called Vespertilio-Homo, as well as single-horned goats, miniature zebras, and bipedal tailless beavers.

A drawing of one of the lunar inhabitants [Image is in the Public Domain]

The Moon, they said, was also covered with active volcanoes, but the beings there used them as power sources, allowing the Vespertilio-Homo to live in large thriving cities:

[Image is in the Public Domain]

And just like today, when Trump invariably precedes his lies with "my advisors are telling me" or "I've heard from reputable sources," The Sun gave this "research" an attribution -- but they boldly named names.  The source, they said, was one Andrew Grant (who was fictitious), the assistant and dear friend of John Herschel (who very much was not).

John Herschel was a highly respected British astronomer, mathematician, chemist, and polymath, son of William Herschel (who discovered Uranus).  The younger Herschel had established a name for himself in planetary astronomy, and in fact had studied and named seven of the moons of Saturn and four of the moons of Uranus.  So his was a canny choice by The Sun -- it gave automatic legitimacy to the article's contents.

It took over a month for the entire story to come unraveled.  Pressed by scientifically-literate readers to show them the amazing telescope, they responded that it had sadly been destroyed in a fire -- the enormous lens's capacity for "concentrating the rays of light" had proved its own undoing, and completely burned down the observatory where it resided.  It was only when Herschel was asked about the research and said he knew nothing about it that the owners of The Sun were confronted, and finally -- reluctantly -- they admitted it had been a hoax all along.

Interestingly, though, they never published an actual retraction of the articles.  Five years later, one of The Sun's reporters, Richard Adams Locke, admitted he'd written the story, but said he'd done it as satire, to "show how science can be and is influenced by the thoughts of religion."  Which seems like a pretty flimsy claim to me.  I think the great likelihood is that it was a publicity stunt to boost circulation, and as such, it worked brilliantly -- The Sun became one of the bestselling newspapers in the United States, and survived until 1950.

The lie also had astonishing longevity.  Even after the owners of The Sun admitted it had all been a hoax -- there were no bat-creatures, no miniature zebras, no bipedal beavers -- people still claimed it was true.  The admission, not the original story, had been the hoax, they said, and The Sun's owners had only changed course because they thought the American people couldn't handle how weird the truth was.  Years later, poor John Herschel was still being asked about the bat-winged Moon men and his role in discovering them.

My dad used to say that trying to clean up the results of a lie was about as easy as getting toothpaste back into the tube.  And the Great Moon Hoax of 1835 illustrates another dark truth; the fact that getting suckered by an attractive lie can cause you to swing all the way over into cynicism.  Some readers who found out about the hoax concluded that nothing in the newspaper could be trusted.  It's like Mark Twain's observation: "You can learn too much from experience.  A cat that sits on a hot stove will never sit on a hot stove again, but it probably won't sit on a cool one, either."

Cynicism, as I've pointed out more than once, is no smarter than gullibility.  It's just as lazy to conclude that everyone is lying to you as it is to believe that no one is.  But it's a tragedy when the media itself is the source of the lies.  While I can't condone cynicism about the media, I do understand it.  Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, "You are entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts."  Which is true enough, but that presupposes we can actually find out what the facts are.  And when the sources you are supposed to be able to trust are themselves lying to you, it creates a catch-22 that I'm damned if I know how to get out of.

****************************************

Ministry of propaganda

Is it too much to ask that the Trump administration simply tells the damn truth?

That's all I ask.  Just stop lying.  I'm fine with having differences of opinion over policy.  For example, claiming that unhooking from fossil fuels and switching to renewable energy would be an unreasonable burden on our economy is not the same thing as saying climate change isn't occurring.

The first is a policy question we could discuss, and perhaps, come to consensus about.  The second is a lie.  And as long as you're simply lying about the facts, there is no discussion to be had.

Take, for example, the person who would have to be included in the top five most dangerous members of this regime; Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.  He is an anti-science ideologue of the worst sort, and because of him the CDC is now limiting access to COVID-19 vaccinations and canceling funding for this year's flu vaccine -- including the potentially pandemic bird flu.

All part of his "Make America Healthy Again" campaign.  Because horrible policies are just fine as long as you give them a snappy name, right?

Of course right.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of the U. S. Air Force]

It doesn't end with anti-vaxx nonsense, either.  Just this week, RFK stated that gender-affirming care for individuals with gender dysphoria should be discontinued -- once again, flying in the face of scientific study after scientific study.  Ignore the science, he says; instead, listen to the directives from the government.

And what is the government suggesting instead?

Why, "conversion therapy."

Yep, the same thing that was touted to "cure homosexuality," and which (once again) study after study has shown to be (1) ineffective, and (2) psychologically damaging.  RFK's letter to healthcare providers states that they should uphold their oaths to "do no harm" by following a strategy that has been conclusively shown to do harm.

Then there's his report on "gold-standard" scientific research that allegedly supports his viewpoints on holistic health and the sins of Big Pharma -- which contains (1) dozens of citations that were identified as mischaracterized by the actual authors themselves, and (2) at least seven citations for studies that appear to be nonexistent.  In other words, RFK pulled the middle-school bibliography-boosting stunt of making up plausible-looking sources, taking others and claiming they said things they didn't actually say, and hoping like hell no one notices.

Well, someone noticed.  But did he retract the report and apologize?

Ha.  Of course he didn't.  This administration never apologizes for anything.  Confronted by their own blatant lies, they just double down, stamping their feet and saying "it is so true!", and rely on the fact that their supporters have no scientific training and very short memories.

Oh, and also this week, he promised a ban on federally-funded medical researchers from publishing in top-flight journals like Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, and Journal of the American Medical Association.  Why?  Because they're "corrupt."  Instead, he wants them to publish in a journal he's going to run, after vetting researchers as "good, legitimate scientists" -- meaning, of course, that they agree with him.

Look, it's not (as I've said many times before) that I'm unaware of the problems inherent in the American medical system.  My wife is a nurse, so I hear about a lot of it from her, and I've witnessed the misery that friends and family members have gone through trying to navigate their way through predatory insurance companies, inefficient and understaffed medical care providers, and ridiculously overpriced pharmaceuticals.  I have one friend who's had a ton of chronic health problems, and has gone through the wringer with misprescribed medications and unmanaged side effects.

But RFK is making a bad situation much, much worse.  His outright lies and barrage of unapologetic misinformation are going to kill people, pure and simple.  But my guess is that no one is going to pull on the reins, because we can't stop a program called "Make America Healthy Again," right?  What, do you want to Make America Unhealthy Again?

Honestly, I put the lion's share of the blame here on the members of Congress who voted to approve his appointment to the Cabinet.  It's not like his views were some kind of a secret; we knew about incidents like his lies about the measles vaccine resulting in an epidemic in Samoa that killed eighty people.  The man goes way past "unqualified," into the territory of "outright dangerous."  He should never have been appointed, much less confirmed.

So this is episode #352,981 of "We Tried To Warn You."  And now we're seeing the results of that dreadful lapse of civic responsibility on the part of our elected officials.

All I can say is that insofar as you can, take care of your health.  Take precautions, get the vaccines that are available, and educate yourself using actual scientific research and not Ministry of Propaganda doublespeak.  Even so, my suspicion is that it's going to be a rough few years.

****************************************

Sundrops

It's always a little surprising to find out that phenomena that are (figuratively speaking) right in our own neighborhood are still a mystery.

One example is the temperature of the solar corona.  We aren't usually aware of the solar corona -- its eerie pinkish luminescence is ordinarily lost in the much brighter radiance of the solar photosphere.  But it becomes visible during a total solar eclipse:

The total solar eclipse of 21 August 2017, photographed by Giuseppe Donatiello [Image is in the Public Domain]

The core of the Sun is estimated to have a temperature of about 15,700,000 K; that heat energy reaches the surface (largely through convection) and then is lost to space.  The outer layer, or photosphere -- the part we can see from Earth on a sunny day -- is around 5,800 K, which is still pretty hot.  But the wispy corona that surrounds the sun is around 5,000,000 K.

But how can that be?  Since, presumably, it's obtaining its heat from the photosphere, how can it be hotter than its own heat source?  Doesn't that break the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says (amongst other things) that heat energy only flows from hotter objects to cooler ones?

Well, one thing to keep in mind -- not that it solves the mystery, or anything, but at least to get the facts straight -- is that temperature and heat energy are not the same thing, although they are clearly related.  Temperature is a measure of the kinetic energy of molecules, and that depends on more than their heat energy content, but factors like what the material is made of and how densely packed it is.  When I explained this to my students, I used the example of a pot of water heated to boiling (100 C) and an oven heated to 100 C (212 F).  Now imagine putting one hand in the pot of water and the other in the oven for five seconds.

Wouldn't be the same, would it?  Water holds a great deal more heat energy than air does -- at the same temperature.

So the five million Kelvin temperature of the corona is a measure of how fast the molecules are moving.  But still -- something is giving them that much kinetic energy.  So how's it all work?

Now, a new study from the National Solar Observatory has provided one piece of the puzzle -- but in the process, raised more questions.

It appears that packets of extremely hot material are being launched from the surface of the Sun.  When they get away from the turbulent photosphere, the pressure drops, and these "heat bombs" explode, releasing their energy into the corona.  The cooled plasma then recondenses and falls back into the Sun as "coronal raindrops."

Raindrops twenty kilometers wide.

So at least part of the answer is that this launching of plasma from the surface is acting as a heat energy transporter.  But how this process sustains the coronal temperature at a (much) higher value than the surface of the Sun below it is still mysterious, as is the connection between coronal rain and larger-scale phenomena like sunspots, solar prominences, and coronal mass ejections (including the scarily enormous Miyake events).

Like the best science, this study suggests an explanation for some facets of the phenomenon, but leaves a great deal of room for further study.  And points out the fact that we still have many mysteries left to ponder, including about our closest star, something we see every clear day.  Even the familiar can lead us into deep waters fast -- if you ask the right questions.

****************************************

Good friends

It's a point I've made before, but it's worth saying again: we queer folks are not "pushing our lifestyle in other people's faces" simply because we'd like (1) some acknowledgement that we exist, and (2) the same rights and respect that everyone else gets automatically.

In the current regime here in the United States there are places of employment where people in same-sex relationships aren't allowed to display photographs of their partners, or even mention them.  "It's okay, I guess, as long as no one knows who you actually are," is the general gist.  There seems to be a real fear that just being around openly queer people will cause straight men and women to switch teams.  But really -- do you honestly think that's how all this works?  I mean, think about it.  Some one hundred percent straight guy finds out his coworker is gay, and suddenly gets this dazed look on his face and says, "I shall go out and kiss a man immediately"?  Seriously?

After all, it's not like it works the other way, is it?  As a teenager I was exposed to dozens, probably hundreds, of books, movies, and television shows depicting couples in straight relationships, and not a single one about queer people, and I turned out queer anyhow.  Funny thing, that.

Almost like it's inborn and hardwired, or something.

The result of this mindset is that we not only have to deal with out-and-out homophobia, but a whole array of attitudes that don't wish us active harm, but just would prefer it if we were invisible.  Take, for example, the article about a monument built by Alexander the Great for his lover Hephaestion I just stumbled on a couple of days ago.

There, I said it, didn't I?  They were lovers.  Alexander was either gay or bisexual, and he was deeply in love with Hephaestion.  They were described as "one soul inhabiting two bodies" by Aristotle, who knew both men well.  Their relationship was compared more than once to that of Achilles and Patroclus, which is not exactly a chaste allusion.  Plutarch recounts that they paid a visit to the tombs of the two Greek heroes, where Alexander garlanded Achilles's tomb and Hephaestion Patroclus's -- then ran a race, naked, in their honor.

Totally straight behavior, that, right?

Of course right.

Then there's the incident -- also related by Plutarch -- where Alexander allowed Hephaestion to read something he'd written but wanted to remain secret, and to symbolize this touched his signet ring to Hephaestion's lips.  The moment has been depicted many times in art:

Alexander Touches His Ring to Hephaestion's Mouth by Johann Heinrich Tischbein (1781) [Image is in the Public Domain]

When Hephaestion died suddenly of what was probably typhus in Ecbatana (now in Iran) in 324 B.C.E., Alexander was inconsolable.  The historian Arrian says that upon seeing Hephaestion dead, Alexander "flung himself on the body of his friend and lay there nearly all day long in tears, and refused to be parted from him until he was dragged away by force by his companions."

Oh, what good friends they were.

Alexander commissioned a massive tomb in Hephaestion's honor at Amphipolis in Macedonia -- the Kastas Tomb -- which is the subject of the article I linked above.  [Nota bene: Alexander didn't live to see it completed; he died himself the following year of uncertain causes.]  The tomb is filled with symbolic representations of the spiritual and physical bonds of love, and the hope for being reunited in the afterlife.

Despite all this, when the two were depicted as lovers in the 2004 film Alexander, there was an outcry that "Oliver Stone turned Alexander the Great gay!" and how dare they depict this heroic figure as perhaps having same-sex attraction.  It's apparently hard for some people to imagine that a guy could be a brilliant king and military leader, and still be queer. 

What's striking, though, is that there's a much more subtle aspect of this, beyond the predictable snarling from the overt homophobes.  What I noticed about the archaeology article was that never once was it explicitly mentioned that Alexander and Hephaestion might have had a sexual relationship.  Throughout, they're referred to as "friends" or "confidants" or "companions;" the closest the writer comes is saying that they clearly had a "strong emotional bond" and that the tomb is a "tribute to love and loyalty."

Why the hell are they afraid of saying it?  I mean, if you want to err on the side of caution, at least admit that it was possible.

Apparently even that is a bridge too far.

It's all part and parcel of the "don't ask, don't tell" mentality, isn't it?  "We're fine as long as we can pretend you queer people don't exist and never have."  Well, allow me to point out that this, too, is homophobia.  I spent decades in the closet out of fear and shame from this kind of thinking.  And, straight readers, if you don't think this is damaging, I want you to imagine what it would be like if your employer told you that you must never mention you are in an opposite-sex relationship.  Oh, it's fine, as long as no one knows.  Don't bring your spouse or significant other to the company picnic, don't be seen holding hands in public, don't have a photograph of you as a couple on your desk.

Now imagine if your government was saying the same thing.

Yes, I know that there are places in the world that have it much worse, where being openly queer can get you imprisoned, tortured, or executed.  But we here in the west need to keep in mind that there are ways to oppress people that are subtler and more insidious.  How is this sort of thing any different from putting Jews, Romani, and Blacks (just to name three of many groups this has happened to) in a position where they feel like they have to hide who they are in order to "pass?"

If you think that's wrong, then so is this.

I'm out publicly, so it's far too late for me to hide even if I wanted to.  But honestly -- I wouldn't go back to being invisible even if I could.  All those terrified years did a lot of damage to me emotionally, damage I doubt I'll ever completely heal from (and that's not even counting the regrets over the richer, more honest life I could have had).  To make it clear, I'm not unhappy where I am today; despite all I've been through, I've arrived at a good place.

I just wish I'd had a happier past, is all.

And I will continue to speak out against this kind of straightwashing.  Because it not only is an inaccurate view of history, but does damage to queer people right now.  I've often wondered if there had been honest, positive depictions of LGBTQ+ people in the fiction and nonfiction I read as a teen, maybe I'd have come out as bi when I realized it (age fifteen or so) rather than hiding for another forty years.  Maybe I still wouldn't have, I dunno; southern Louisiana in the seventies wasn't exactly a congenial place for people who were different, and I'm honestly not a very brave person.

But if by speaking out, I can help other people who are still in the closet -- well, don't expect me to shut up.  It's the least I can do after maintaining my own personal silence for four very long decades.

****************************************

Dry times

If I asked you to name the driest spots on Earth, I wonder if this one would come to mind -- even though it's a top contender for the number one spot.

You might have thought of Chile's Atacama Desert, or possibly somewhere in the Gobi, Sahara, or the Rub' al Khali (Empty Quarter) of Saudi Arabia.  All good guesses, and certainly they're not what I'd call wet climates.  In fact, parts of the Atacama come in second; the high elevation and perpetual clear skies are why it's such a great spot for astronomical observatories -- it's currently home to three of the best, and a fourth is being built.  The La Silla Observatory, the Paranal Observatory (which includes the Very Large Telescope), the Llano de Chajnantor Observatory (which hosts the ALMA international radio observatory), and the Cerro Armazones Observatory (site of the future Extremely Large Telescope), are all in the Atacama Desert.

As an aside, can astronomers please try to come up with better names for their observatories?  I mean, what the hell?  The "Very Large Telescope" and the "Extremely Large Telescope"?  What's next, the "Abso-fucking-lutely Humongous Telescope, No Really I'm Totally Serious You Won't Believe How Big It Is"?

Probably not.  AflHTNRITSYWBHBII would be hard to fit on a grant application.

But I digress.

Anyhow, the top spot for the driest climate on Earth is the McMurdo Dry Valley region of Antarctica, and beats most of the other possibilities by a significant margin.  Some studies indicate the place hasn't had any significant accumulated precipitation in over two million years.  What small amount does fall -- estimates are in the range of a hundred millimeters per year -- almost all evaporates before it reaches the ground because of the fierce katabatic winds.  Katabatic winds occur because air density is strongly dependent upon temperature, and the McMurdo Dry Valleys are surrounded by mountains.  Air masses above the mountaintops lose heat faster, making them become more dense; the air then flows downhill, easily reaching hurricane speed, and pools in the valleys.  Most of the air already started out dry; any humidity it originally had was precipitated out as snow on the windward side of the mountains.  This drops the relative humidity to only a few percent and keeps it there.

Any snowflakes falling into that don't stand a chance.  They don't melt; it's too cold for that.  They sublimate -- turn from a solid to a gas without passing through the liquid phase.

That's how cold and dry it is.

The result is that the McMurdo Dry Valleys are basically nothing but a vast expanse of extremely cold rock, gravel, and sand.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Dturme, Labyrinth, Wright Valley, McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The exposed rocks are mostly of Triassic age, and belong to the Beacon Formation, which is largely made of sandstone.  There are a few volcanic intrusions only a few million years old, but by and large, the whole place is just one big bunch of very old wind-eroded sandstone, quartzite, and pebble conglomerate.

And yet... there are living things there.

Not many, of course, but the McMurdo Dry Valleys are home to endolithic bacteria, which live in the cracks and fissures inside rocks, subsisting on the minerals therein and the tiny amount of water in the soil (supplemented from time to time by trickles of glacial meltwater).  They're still poorly understood, but are thought to be metabolically similar to the mid-ocean vent bacteria, which are able to use minerals like sulfur, iron, and manganese as the basis of their metabolism.

All of which makes me wonder if Mars hosts life.  McMurdo has been described as "the most Mars-like environment on Earth;" the site has been used to test equipment for the Mars rover missions.  Hell, if bacteria can survive in McMurdo, it's not much of a stretch to surmise that there might be life underground on Mars -- perhaps a holdover from the distant past, when Mars was a much warmer, wetter place.

I find places like this fascinating.  The idea that we have here on our (mostly) temperate and green planet a spot so profoundly inhospitable is pretty astonishing.  I wonder how (or if) climate change will alter things there?  The entire continent is climatically isolated by the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, one of the hugest oceanic water transporters in the world -- the amount of water flowing through the Drake Passage, between South America and Antarctica, is estimated at around 130 times the volume of all the world's rivers put together -- so it's hard to imagine this shifting in any significant way.

But given that many oceanographers fear that meltwater from Greenland is going to block the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation -- the best-known part of which is the Gulf Stream -- maybe I shouldn't speak too soon.

So that's our look at the Earth's answer to Mars.  Not, I'm afraid, a locale I'm eager to visit, given how little I like the cold.  I'm adventurous, but I draw the line at a place that hostile.

Plus, I like rocks as much as the next guy, but when there's nothing else to see -- well, I can think of a few other places that are higher on the destinations list.  I'm content to appreciate McMurdo from afar.

****************************************

Home bizarre

My house is, to put not too fine a point on it, kind of a disaster area.

A friend described it as "looking like a museum run by lunatics."  Part of this is that my wife and I have dozens of interests, so we have a huge amount of random stuff.  Carol is a professional artist (you can and should check out her amazing work here), so between the pens and inks and watercolors and framing supplies -- as well as all the finished pieces -- it takes up a lot of room.  We're both amateur potters, which is a whole other set of supplies and products.  I'm a fanatical book and CD collector, and also a musician with (at last count) five flutes, three recorders, three pennywhistles, a set of bagpipes, a guitar, a djembe, a concertina, and a piano.  I collect masks, and have them hanging on walls all over the house.  Then there's the odd random stuff; just from where I'm sitting, I can see a Bigfoot statue, an antique typewriter, a gargoyle, a bronze sundial, several ceramic statues of characters from Doctor Who and Lost in Space, and a scale model of the Miller-Urey apparatus.

Our house isn't neat, but I can at least confidently assert that it's interesting.

There's also the problem that Carol and I are both housework-impaired.  This is not helped by the fact that we have three large dogs.  When we have guests coming over it's preceded by three days of panic-cleaning so we don't die of humiliation as soon as our guests walk through the front door.  On the other hand, it's a good thing we sometimes do have guests, because otherwise one day we'd go missing, and when the police came to investigate they'd find us both trapped in enormous clumps of dog hair.

We'll never make Home Beautiful, but we did make the May edition of Home Chaotic.

My work station

The reason all this comes up is a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, who sent me a link suggesting that the problem isn't that I have a million interests, the attention span of a fruit fly, and zero aptitude for housework.

The problem is my home needs an exorcism.

At least that's what Australian psychic Catarina Ligato would probably say.  Her vocation is "cleansing" houses of their past inhabitants, who do stuff like creating "negative energy," making rooms feel unnaturally cold, and moving your belongings around.  They can also produce odd smells, although I wonder if we'd even notice that given our aforementioned three dogs.

If Ligato checks a place out and finds it's haunted, she respectfully asks the disembodied ghosts of former residents to leave the place in peace.  She also uses a "crystal wand" and "sacred spray" to encourage their exit.

Kind of the spirit world equivalent of a mop and a can of Lysol, is how I think of it.

"Doing this work is a calling, it’s not for everyone," Ligato said.  "I know other psychics who ended up in psych wards for losing their balance.  [Working in homes] can feel a bit more positive, because you’re helping both the inhabitants and the spirits to find peace."

If you don't want to shell out the cash to hire Ligato (her minimum fee is three hundred dollars) -- or if, like me, you live halfway around the world from her -- you can always DIY it.  Burn some essential oils, she says, play some calm music, keep the windows open, and "declutter regularly."

It's this last one that would be the sticking point for us, because as I mentioned earlier, clutter is kind of our raison d'être.  I mean, I guess it'd be nice to live in a neat, clean house (not that I know first-hand what that's like), but... I like my stuff.  This is my Emotional Security Stuff.  If I were to start doing a Marie-Kondo-style culling, I'd be a little lost.  Okay, maybe I don't need an Indonesian statue of a cat playing a flute, but yeah, Marie, it kind of does spark joy.

So I think the fact that we're constantly misplacing stuff probably isn't caused by the ghosts of former inhabitants moving our belongings around, but more that (1) we have a huge amount of random things strewn everywhere, and (2) we're both kind of scatterbrained.  As far as it feeling cold sometimes -- well, it's an old house, and we do live in upstate New York, which is a four-season climate (the four seasons are Almost Winter, Winter, Still Fucking Winter, and Road Construction).  I don't think I'm ready to pay Catarina Ligato to fly out from Australia to do an exorcism, entertaining as that would be.

I might give the essential oils a try, though.  I doubt it'll help with the overall cleanliness, but maybe it'll help with the doggy smell, which can get pretty intense sometimes.   Every move in the right direction is a good thing.

****************************************