Footprints

The southern tip of mainland Italy is called Calabria.  It's a strikingly beautiful place, containing three national parks (Pollino National Park, Sila National Park and Aspromonte National Park), and a stretch of coastline -- near Reggio, facing across the Straits of Messina to Sicily -- that poet Gabriele D'Annunzio called "the most beautiful kilometer in Italy."  It's a region blessed with more than its share of dramatic scenery.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Cliff at Tropea, Italy, Sep 2005 , CC BY-SA 2.5]

Calabria forms the "toe of Italy's boot."  I remember noticing the country's odd shape when I was a kid and first became fascinated with maps (a fascination that remains with me today), and wondering why it looked like that; back then, when plate tectonics was still a new science, I doubt they really understood it on a level any deeper than "it's near a plate margin, and that moves stuff around."  Today, we have a much more detailed understanding of the geology of the area, and it is complex.

Tectonic map of southern Italy and Sicily [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jpvandijk, J.P. van Dijk, Janpieter van Dijk, Johannes Petrus van Dijk, CentralMediterranean-GeotectonicMap, CC BY-SA 4.0]

On its simplest level, the entire southern half of Italy is being pushed to the southeast, and it's riding up and over the northern edge of the African Plate.  This process is responsible not only for the volcanism of the region -- Mount Etna being the most obvious example -- but the massive earthquakes that have shaped it, in part creating the gorgeous topography.  (It also has made it a dangerous place to live.  The Messina Earthquake of 1908, with an epicenter right across the straits from Calabria, had a magnitude of 7.1 and killed an estimated eighty thousand people, most of them in the first three minutes after the quake struck and the majority of the buildings collapsed.)

As interesting as the geology of the region is, that's not what spurred me to write about the topic today.  What I'd like to tell you about is Calabria's tremendous linguistic diversity, an embarrassment of riches packed into a small geographical area.  The main language, of course, is standard Italian, but a great many people there (especially in the southern parts) speak Calabrian, a Greek-influenced-Latin derivative that is mostly mutually intelligible with Italian but has some distinct vocabulary and pronunciations. 

Then there's Grecanico, which is derived from an archaic dialect of Byzantine Greek, and is spoken by a group of people descended from folks who settled in the region more than a thousand years ago and have somehow maintained their ethnic identity the whole time.  It's written with the Latin, not Greek, alphabet -- but other than that has more in common with Thessalian Greek than with Italian.

Another language that has little to do with Italian is Arbëresh, a dialect of Albanian brought in with migrants during the Late Middle Ages.  From some of its idiosyncrasies, it appears to be related to Tosk Albanian, a group of dialects spoken in the southern parts of Albania, near the border of Greece.  It's astonishing that we can still identify the part of the world the ancestors of the Arbëreshë people came from centuries ago -- by the peculiarities of the language they have spoken during the more than six hundred years they've lived in isolated communities in Calabria.

Finally, there's Gardiol, which is related to Occitan (also known as Provençal or Languedoc), the Romance language widely spoken in the southern half of France.  Like with Calabrian (and also Catalan in Spain), most Occitan speakers in France speak the majority language as well, but use Occitan when speaking with family, friends, and locals.  The ancestors of the speakers of Gardiol came in with the persecution of the Waldensian "heretics" in France in the thirteenth century, who found a refuge in a thinly-populated part of northern Calabria.  Once again -- amazingly -- they've retained their ethnic identity and language through all the vagaries of time since their arrival.

All of that -- and standard Italian as well -- in an area of around fifteen thousand square kilometers, a little more than the size of the state of Connecticut.

UNESCO describes all four of these languages -- Calabrian, Grecanico, Arbëresh, and Gardiol -- as "in serious danger of disappearing."  It's sad to think of these footprints of history vanishing, and taking along with them pieces of human culture that somehow had persisted for centuries.  I understand why this happens; in modern life, speaking and writing the dominant language is not only useful, it's often essential for getting a job and making a living.  These little pockets of other languages survived better when people had little mobility and even less connectedness to others living far away.  In today's world, they seem doomed.

Change is the fate of all things, but it inevitably comes with a sense of loss.  The linguistic diversity of the beautiful region of Calabria will, very likely, soon be gone.  Like biodiversity loss, this diminishes the richness of our world.  I hope that linguists are working to catalog and study these unique languages -- before the last native speakers are gone forever.

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Hello, dolly

You may have heard that a 54-year-old paranormal investigator named Dan Rivera died a few days ago while on tour with a supposedly possessed Raggedy Ann doll named "Annabelle."  I know I have, because about two dozen loyal readers of Skeptophilia have sent me links about the story.

Positively DO NOT.  Whatever you were thinking about doing, just DON'T.

According to the most recent news releases, police found no signs of foul play or anything suspicious about Rivera's death, although more information may come out once an autopsy is performed.

Annabelle has a long history.  Her reputation for supernatural hijinks goes back to the 1970s, when her owner reported odd and scary behavior (moving on her own, leaving scrawled and threatening notes, knocking stuff over in the middle of the night) to none other than Ed and Lorraine Warren.  Ed Warren was a "self-taught demonologist," which is pretty much the only kind there is at the moment, given that Cotton Mather, Tomás de Torquemada, and Girolamo Savonarola are no longer in charge of designing university curricula.  Lorraine was a "light-trance medium" who assisted her husband on his demon-hunting expeditions.  If you've heard of them, it's probably because of their involvement in the famous Amityville Horror case, which was the subject of much hype and a movie featuring one (1) puking nun.  (Interesting fact: my wife, who grew up on Long Island, worked in a record store in Amityville during the height of the craze.  She and her coworkers were constantly being asked "Where's the Horror House?"  Their stock answer was "Take the first left, go about a mile to the third stoplight, then turn right.  Three blocks down, on the right."  In point of fact, none of them knew nor cared where the Horror House was, because they rightly believed that the entire story was bullshit.)

In any case, Annabelle was given to the Warrens, who locked her up in a cabinet in the museum of the occult they ran, but they said they still periodically found her running loose when they got there in the morning, and more than once they heard eerie laughter when no one was there.  This drew the attention of various people, all of whom regretted getting involved.  These allegedly included a skeptic who was given "psychic slashes" that drew blood; a priest who insulted Annabelle and forthwith ran his car into a tree; and a homicide detective who was stabbed by the doll, "receiving injuries that forced him into an early retirement."

The museum closed after Lorraine's death at age 92 in 2019, and the New England Society for Psychic Research took charge of Annabelle, sending her out earlier this year on a "Devils On the Run" tour that showcased items from the Warrens' collection.

You have to wonder why they did this.  I would think the members of the New England Society for Psychic Research would, by and large, believe that all this possessed-doll stuff is completely reasonable.  So wouldn't they go, "Hell no, we gotta keep Annabelle locked up, she's too dangerous, someone could get hurt"?  Nope, they sent her right out on tour, suggesting that either they (1) believe Annabelle's powers are real but don't give a damn if she does injure someone, (2) believe in some psychic stuff but figure Annabelle is nonsense, or (3) don't believe any of it but saw a good opportunity to cash in on the fact that lots of other people do.

You also have to wonder what they think now that one of her handlers has died.

Of course, the great likelihood is that Rivera died of natural causes.  I get that 54 is a pretty young age to drop dead; it'd be surprising, given that I am a 64-year-old person, if that thought didn't cross my mind.  But I'm going to follow my Prime Directive of eliminating all the normal and natural explanations before jumping to a paranormal or supernatural one, and I think once we learn what the autopsy finds, it'll turn out Rivera had a heart attack or stroke.

So it's sad -- from the tributes written by his friends, he sounds like he was a good guy -- but unlikely to be due to the evil machinations of "Annabelle."

One of the people who sent me a link added the message, "Be careful what you write about her, though!  She'll get even with you if you make fun!"  My response to that is:

Ha ha ha ha ha, Annabelle, you are ugly and your mom dresses you funny.  You've got a blank expression, a goofy smile, and what is that triangle-thing in the middle of your face supposed to be?  You call that a nose?  Oh, and you don't like my saying all that?  What're you gonna do about it?  Go ahead, girl, gimme your best shot.  I dare you.

Okay, that should do it.  I'm not sure what the priest said who ended up wrecking his car, but maybe this will be enough for some psychic retribution.

I'll report here if I have any sudden attacks of gout or bursitis or brain aneurysms or whatnot.  Myself, I think I'll probably be okay, but we'll see.  Gordon vs. Annabelle 2025 -- who are you rooting for?

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Who benefits?

One of the most curious features of evolutionary biology is the cui bono principle.

Cui bono? is Latin for "who benefits?" and is an idea that found its first expression in courts of law.  If a crime is committed, look for who benefitted from it.  In evolutionary biology, it's adjuring the researcher to look for an evolutionary explanation for seemingly odd, even self-harming behavior.  Somebody, the principle claims, must benefit from it.

A while back, I did a post on one of the strangest and most complex examples of cui bono; the pathogen Toxoplasma gondii, a protist that primarily infects humans, cats, rats, and mice.  In each, it triggers changes in behavior, but different ones.  It turns rats and mice fearless, and in fact, makes them attracted to the smell of cat urine.  Infected cats are more gregarious and needing of physical contact (either with other cats or with humans).  Humans are more likely to be neurotic and anxious, impelling them to seek comfort from others... including, of course, their pets.  Each of these behaviors increases the likelihood of the pathogen jumping to another host.

That this behavioral engineering is successful can be gauged by the fact that by some estimates three billion people are Toxoplasma-positive.  Yes, that's "billion" with a "b."  As in, one third of the human population.  I can pretty much guarantee that if you've ever owned a cat, you are Toxoplasma-positive.

What effects that has had on the collective behavior of humanity, I'll leave you to ponder.

I just ran into another cool example of cui bono a couple of days ago -- well, cool if you're not a tomato grower.  This is another one for which the answer to "who benefits?" turns out to be a pathogen, this time a virus called tomato yellow leaf curl virus, which has the obvious effect on infected plants.

Uninfected (top) and infected (bottom) tomato plants [Image credit: Zhe Yan et al., MDPI]

The researchers, led by Peng Liang of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, noticed a strange pattern; there's a pest of tomato plants (and many other crops) called the silverwing whitefly (Bemisia tabaci) that shows a distinct preference for tomato plants depending on who is infected with what.  If the whitefly is uninfected with the virus, it's preferentially attracted to infected tomato plants; if the whitefly is already infected, it shows a preference for uninfected plants.

So cui bono?  The virus, of course.  Infected whiteflies pass the virus along to uninfected plants, and uninfected whiteflies pick the virus up from infected plants.  Clever.  Insidious, but damn clever.

Liang et al. found that the virus accomplishes this by meddling with a chemical signal from tomato plants called β-myrcene.  The virus actually up-regulates the β-myrcene gene -- essentially, turning the volume up to eleven on β-myrcene's production -- which attracts uninfected whiteflies.  Once the virus gets into the whiteflies, it dials down the sensitivity of the whiteflies' β-myrcene receptors, making them less attracted to it.  

No need to be lured in by the infected plants if you're already infected yourself.

So like with Toxoplasma, we have here a microscopic pathogen that is manipulating the behavior of more than one host species.  It's fascinating but creepy.  You have to wonder what other features of our behavior are being steered by pathogens we might not even be aware of.  Recent studies have found that between five and eight percent of our DNA is composed of endogenous retroviruses -- scraps of DNA left behind by viruses in the genomes of our forebears, and which are suspected to have a role in multiple sclerosis and some forms of schizophrenia.

Who knows what else they might be doing?

If you find this whole topic a little shudder-inducing, you're not alone.  Science is like that sometimes.  If there's one thing I've learned, it's that the universe is under no compulsion to make me feel comfortable.  If you agree, sorry I put you through reading this.  Go cuddle with your kitty.

I'm sure that'll make you feel better.

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Tense situation

In my Critical Thinking classes, I did a unit on statistics and data, and how you tell if a measurement is worth paying attention to.  One of the first things to consider, I told them, is whether a particular piece of data is accurate or merely precise -- two words that in common parlance are used interchangeably.

In science, they don't mean the same thing.  A piece of equipment is said to be precise if it gives you close to the same value every time.  Accuracy, though, is a higher standard; data are accurate if the values are not only close to each other when measured with the same equipment, but agree with data taken independently, using a different device or a different method.

A simple example is that if my bathroom scale tells me every day for a month that my mass is (to within one kilogram either way) 239 kilograms, it's highly precise, but very inaccurate.

This is why scientists always look for independent corroboration of their data.  It's not enough to keep getting the same numbers over and over; you've got to be certain those numbers actually reflect reality.

This all comes up because of a new look at one of the biggest scientific questions known -- the rate of expansion of the entire universe.

[Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of NASA]

A while back, I wrote about some experiments that were allowing physicists to home in on the Hubble constant, a quantity that is a measure of how fast everything in the universe is flying apart.  And the news appeared to be good; from a range of between 50 and 500 kilometers per second per megaparsec, physicists had been able to narrow down the value of the Hubble constant to between 65.3 and 75.6.

The problem is, nobody's been able to get closer than that -- and in fact, recent measurements have widened, not narrowed, the gap.

There are two main ways to measure the Hubble constant.  The first is to use information like red shift, Cepheid variables (stars whose period of brightness oscillation varies predictably with their intrinsic brightness, making them a good "standard candle" to determine the distance to other galaxies), and type 1a supernovae to figure out how fast the galaxies we see are receding from each other.  The other is to use the cosmic microwave background radiation -- the leftovers from the radiation produced by the Big Bang -- to determine the age of the universe, and therefore, how fast it's expanding.

So this is a little like checking my bathroom scale by weighing myself on it, then comparing my weight as measured by the scale at the gym and seeing if I get the same answer.

And the problem is, the measurement of the Hubble constant by these two methods is increasingly looking like it's resulting in two irreconcilably different values.  

The genesis of the problem is that as our measurement ability has become more and more precise, the error bars associated with data collection have shrunk considerably.  And if the two measurements were not only precise, but also accurate, you would expect that our increasing precision would result in the two values getting closer and closer together.

Exactly the opposite has happened.

"Five years ago, no one in cosmology was really worried about the question of how fast the universe was expanding," said astrophysicist Daniel Mortlock of Imperial College London.  "We took it for granted.  Now we are having to do a great deal of head scratching – and a lot of research...  Everyone’s best bet was that the difference between the two estimates was just down to chance, and that the two values would converge as more and more measurements were taken. In fact, the opposite has occurred.  The discrepancy has become stronger.  The estimate of the Hubble constant that had the lower value has got a bit lower over the years and the one that was a bit higher has got even greater."

This discrepancy -- called the Hubble tension -- is one of the most vexing problems in astrophysics today.  Especially given that repeated analysis of both the methods used to determine the expansion rate have resulted in no apparent problem with either one.

The two possible solutions to this boil down to (1) our data are off, or (2) there's new physics we don't know about.  A new solution that falls into the first category was proposed last week at the annual meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society by Indranil Banik of the University of Portsmouth, who has been deeply involved in researching this puzzle.  It's possible, he said, that the problem is with one of our fundamental assumptions -- that the universe is both homogeneous and isotropic.

These two are like the ultimate extension of the Copernican principle, that the Earth (and the Solar System and the Milky Way) do not occupy a privileged position in space.  Homogeneity means that any randomly-chosen blob of space is equally likely to have stuff in it as any other; in other words, matter and energy are locally clumpy but universally spread out.  Isotropy means there's no difference dependent on direction; the universe looks pretty much the same no matter which direction you look.

What, Banik asks, if our mistake is in putting together the homogeneity principle with measurements of what the best-studied region of space is like -- the parts near us?

What if we live in a cosmic void -- a region of space with far less matter and energy than average?

We've known those regions exist for a while; in fact, regular readers might recall that a couple of years ago, I wrote a post about one of the biggest, the Boötes Void, which is so large and empty that if we lived right at the center of it, we wouldn't even have been able to see the nearest stars to us until the development of powerful telescopes in the 1960s.  Banik suggests that the void we're in isn't as dramatic as that, but that a twenty percent lower-than-average mass density in our vicinity could account for the discrepancy in the Hubble constant.

"A potential solution to [the Hubble tension] is that our galaxy is close to the center of a large, local void," Banik said.  "It would cause matter to be pulled by gravity towards the higher density exterior of the void, leading to the void becoming emptier with time.  As the void is emptying out, the velocity of objects away from us would be larger than if the void were not there.  This therefore gives the appearance of a faster local expansion rate...  The Hubble tension is largely a local phenomenon, with little evidence that the expansion rate disagrees with expectations in the standard cosmology further back in time.  So a local solution like a local void is a promising way to go about solving the problem."

It would also, he said, line up with data on baryon acoustic oscillations, the fossilized remnants of shock waves from the Big Bang, which account for some of the fine structure of the universe.

"These sound waves travelled for only a short while before becoming frozen in place once the universe cooled enough for neutral atoms to form," Banik said.  "They act as a standard ruler, whose angular size we can use to chart the cosmic expansion history.  A local void slightly distorts the relation between the BAO angular scale and the redshift, because the velocities induced by a local void and its gravitational effect slightly increase the redshift on top of that due to cosmic expansion.  By considering all available BAO measurements over the last twenty years, we showed that a void model is about one hundred million times more likely than a void-free model with parameters designed to fit the CMB observations taken by the Planck satellite, the so-called homogeneous Planck cosmology."

Which sounds pretty good.  I'm only a layperson, but this is the most optimistic I've heard an astrophysicist get on the topic.  Now, it falls back on the data -- showing that the mass/energy density in our local region of space really is significantly lower than average.  In other words, that the universe isn't homogeneous, at least not on those scales.

I'm sure the astrophysics world will be abuzz with this new proposal, so keep your eyes open for developments.  Me, I think it sounds reasonable.  Given recent events here on Earth, it's unsurprising the rest of the universe is rushing away from us.  I bet the aliens lock the doors on their spaceships as they fly by.

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Ringing the changes

I find human behavior absolutely baffling a lot of the time.

I've spent a significant fraction of my life thinking, "Why did (s)he do/say that?"  One positive result of this is that it's turned me into a dedicated observer of the other members of my species.  Even so, I have to say that my efforts have, on the whole, been a failure.  After 64 years on this planet I'm no closer to figuring out why people act the way they do than I was on day one.

Mind you, I'm not saying all the behavior is bad.  It's just that a lot of it is weird.  Take, for example, the English practice of change ringing, one subset of a larger topic called campanology -- the study of bells.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Keichwa at German Wikipedia., Poppenreuth-glocke-1695, CC BY-SA 3.0]

"Ringing the changes" involves taking a sequence of tuned bells and using them to ring a series of patterned mathematical permutations.  So with six bells -- numbered from 1 (the highest-pitched) to 6 (the lowest) -- it might start with a straight cadence down the scale, 1-2-3-4-5-6.  But from there?

One possibility is called a "Plain Bob Minor" (being England, all of the patterns have extremely creative and quirky names), in which each bell takes a turn working its way down the sequence and then back up, and the rules are (1) no sequence can happen twice, and (2) each bell can only switch on each subsequent sequence by a single position.  Here's a part of the Plain Bob Minor pattern, following the positions of the #1 and #2 bells with blue and red lines, respectively:

As you can see, the pattern is mathematical; in fact, whole books have been written analyzing the math of change ringing.  And let me tell you, it's complex.

I first ran into change ringing in the wonderful mystery novel The Nine Tailors by the brilliant British author Dorothy Sayers.  The whole story revolves around it; even the chapters are named after change-ringing patterns, often involving clever puns (Sayers is at her sparkling, intellectual best in this book).  Despite being fairly good at math, how the patterns work (on the larger scale) escapes me; but -- amazingly -- practicing change-ringers have entire sequences memorized.

This is even more astonishing when you consider that a "Full Peal of Seven" -- seven tuned bells -- has 7! (seven factorial, or 5,040) different permutations, each of which has to be rung in its proper place. 

Ringing a Full Peal of Seven takes over three hours.

Here's a group of people doing a sequence called "Jump Changes," which requires twelve bells.  Fear not, this is only a small part of the sequence.  A Full Peal of Twelve would (literally) take years to ring.

What strikes me about change ringing is that although it's mathematically and historically interesting, it's not very interesting to listen to.  At least not for me.  Because a Full Peal goes through all possible permutations, it includes some that sound pretty random.  And long sequences just kind of go on and on.  And on.

In the case of Full Peals of Twelve, AND ON AND ON AND ON.

So it seems like kind of an odd hobby.  Don't get me wrong; I'm glad people are keeping it up.  For one thing, if you watched that video, you probably noticed that change ringing would be really good for building upper-body strength.  For another, it's a piece of English culture that goes back centuries, and it would be sad if it died out.  But more than that, I love that people are so devoted to something so purely weird.

I might not get why this pastime appeals to you, but more power to you if it does.  Hell, if I can spend my time making ceramic Doctor Who figurines, you can be deeply invested in memorizing mathematical patterns of bell ringing.

Maybe I don't understand all the strange side alleys of human behavior, but I definitely encourage them.  The world would be a far happier place if more people devoted their energy into odd and pointless, but entirely harmless, hobbies, rather than using it to figure out how to make groups of people they don't like as miserable as possible.

So hooray for weirdness.  Be proud of what you love, even if other people don't approve.  I was told over and over when I was a child, "No one wants to hear about that," whenever I talked about stuff I was interested in.  The experience left me with a lifelong reluctance to talk to people about what I love most.

And how sad is that?

So let your freak flag fly.  You collect bottle caps?  Cool!  You're a geocacher?  Awesome!  You carve little statues out of bars of soap?  Amazing!  We need more of that kind of thing, and less of... *gestures around vaguely at everything*

Time to ring the changes on your own individuality.  Proudly.

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This week in lunacy

On the whole, I'm an optimist.

It seems a happier way to be.  In general, I would rather expect people to behave well and occasionally be disappointed than to start from the assumption that everyone is an asshole and occasionally be pleasantly surprised.  I know a couple of people who are diehard pessimists, who believe that the worst of humanity is the rule and not the exception, and by and large they're chronically unhappy -- even when things turn out well.

On the other hand, the last few years have been a trial to my generally positive mindset.  I've been writing here at Skeptophilia for fifteen years, and the anti-science attitudes and loony counterfactual beliefs that impelled me to start this blog seem to be as common as ever.  Take, for example, the four stories I came across on Reddit, one after the other, while I was casting about for a topic for today's post.

First we have an article courtesy of the ever-entertaining Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, whose main function seems to be making sure that Lauren Boebert is never proclaimed the Stupidest Member of the United States Congress.  Greene just introduced a bill to make weather modification a felony, because -- and this is a direct quote -- "we need clean air, clean skies, clean rain water, clean ground water, and sun shine just like God created it!"

The irony here is that Greene has supported every one of Donald Trump's efforts to weaken environmental protection -- hobbling the Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Water Act, crippling research into climate change, increasing the number of coal-fired power plants, clear-cutting forests on public land, and deregulating mining and oil production.  But sure, Marjorie, let's outlaw "weather modification," which she says was responsible for Hurricane Helene, the California wildfires, and most recently, the devastating flooding in central Texas.

Hell, if the evil liberal-controlled Deep State could modify the weather, they'd have dispatched EF-5 tornadoes to level Mar-a-Lago ages ago.  But I wouldn't expect logic like that to appeal to Greene, who responded to critics by using my least favorite phrase, "I've done my research," and based on that has come to the conclusion that people who say that hurricanes, wildfires, and floods are natural events are big fat liars.

Expect her "research" to that effect to appear in Nature any time now.

Then we had evangelical preacher Troy Brewer, who claimed that the Texas floods weren't weather modification, they were God sending a message to us.  It was significant, he said, that the flooding (well, some of the flooding) happened on July 4.  In a passage that I swear I'm not making up, Brewer said, "It was a divine signal...  Whenever this thing happened on July the 4th… this is not just about Texas.  This is a word for all the United States of America.  It's no coincidence that 1776 divided by two is 888, the numerical value of the name Jesus in Greek.  Did you know that there were 888 people rescued out of that creek?  888 is the number of Jesus...  And remember that the site of the flood, Kerrville, is the home to the 77-foot-high sculpture known as The Empty Cross."

It does strike me as odd that if this is God sending a message about how lawless and evil and wicked we all are, smiting the shit out of central Texas -- one of the most devoutly Christian places in America -- is kind of an odd move.  I mean, Kerrville isn't exactly Sodom and Gomorrah.  But "God drowned hundreds of good Christians to show you all how important it is to be a good Christian" isn't any crazier than a lot of what these people believe, so I guess it's not really all that surprising.

Next, there's Joe Rogan, who if this was a fair world would have zero credibility left, claiming that Lyme disease was a deliberately-leaked biological weapon from the secret labs on Plum Island.  It probably won't take you longer than a couple of nanoseconds to figure out where he got this amazing revelation from:

RFK Jr.

The only person out there with less scientific credibility than Joe Rogan.

"The ticks are an epidemic because of what happened at Plum Island and the other labs," RFK said in the January 2024 episode of the RFK Jr Podcast.  "We also know that they were experimenting with diseases of the kind, like Lyme disease, at that lab, and they were putting them in ticks and then infecting people."

Of course, this is the kind of thing that gives Joe Rogan multiple orgasms, so he was all in on the bioweapon claim. 

"Turns out there's a lot of real evidence that Lyme disease was weaponized," Rogan said.  "It came out of a lab called Plum Island, which was close to Lyme, Connecticut.  And RFK Jr. firmly believes that this was a weapons program...  What they were going to do is develop these fleas and ticks with a disease that spreads rapidly, wipes out the medical system of a community.  So, you could dump them from a plane, everybody gets infected, overwhelms their medical system, and then they're more vulnerable if you want to attack them...  Can you imagine if those cunts created a fucking disease and now everyone on the East Coast has it?  Because it's mostly out there."

The Rogan/RFK Jr. claim kind of falls prey to the fact that there's ample evidence that Lyme, caused by the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi, has been around for a very long time.  To take just one example, Ötzi -- the "Ice Man," the five-thousand-year-old frozen human found in the Alps in Switzerland -- was found in 2012 to be Lyme-positive through DNA analysis of his tissues.

What, Joe -- did the evil Plum Island scientists use their time machines to go back and infect Ötzi in order to throw us all off their trail?  Or should we tune in next week to hear you come up with some even more insane explanation?

Finally, we have a loony claim surrounding a viral craze I hadn't even heard of.  To be fair, I'm not exactly the sort who immerses himself in pop culture, but this one is apparently huge and had escaped me entirely.  It's called a "Labubu doll," and is a "plush monster elf toy" created by Hong Kong designer Kaising Lung.  It got picked up by a couple of big names like Dua Lipa and Rihanna, and now everyone wants one.

Well, you can't have a popular toy out there without someone deciding that it's eeeeee-vil.  And especially... look at those teeth.  So now people on X and TikTok are warning that you should burn your Labubu doll because it's possessed by a demon called, I shit you not, Pazuzu.

Notwithstanding the fact that Labubu and Pazuzu sound like names that a rich old lady would give her poodles, people are taking this extremely seriously.  "I’m not superstitious, I’m a little stitious, but I’d never buy a Labubu," said one person on X.  "It comes from Pazuzu, which is a demon, and possessed the girl in The Exorcist."

So this individual is warning us not to buy a doll representing a fictional creature because it might be inhabited by a fictional demon who possessed a fictional girl in a fictional movie.

But do go on about how plausible all this is.

Then there's the person who commented, "Please before falling into the trap of Labubu or any trend nowadays, do your research.  THEY’RE MADE AFTER A DEMON DEITY (Pazuzu as they say)."

Yes, of course!  For fuck's sake!  Do your research!

Other people are blessing their Labubus or anointing them with holy water to "turn them into protector spirits." I guess this is better than burning them, at least from the standpoint of releasing toxins from burning plastic into the air, which would probably make Marjorie Taylor Greene think that the liberals were trying to modify the weather using smoldering demon flesh or something.

So.  Yeah.  Some days it's hard to remain optimistic.  Just yesterday, my wife and I were discussing how the average dog is a better person than the average person, and these stories haven't done anything to diminish that assessment.  So I think I'll spend the rest of the day socializing with my dogs.

I'll try being optimistic about humanity again tomorrow.  We'll see how long it lasts.

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Mental models and lying stones

Richard Feynman famously said, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool."

This insightful statement isn't meant to impugn anyone's honesty or intelligence, but to highlight that everyone -- and I'm sure Feynman was very much including himself in this assessment -- has biases that prevent them from seeing clearly.  We've already got a model, an internal framework by which we interpret what we experience, and that inevitably constrains our understanding.

As science historian James Burke points out, in his brilliant analysis of the scientific endeavor The Day the Universe Changed, it's a trap that's impossible to get out of.  You have to have some mental model for how you think the world works, or all the sensory input you receive would simply be chaos.  "Without a structure, a theory for what's there," Burke says, "you don't see anything."

And once you've settled on a model, it's nearly impossible to compromise with.  You're automatically going to take some things as givens and ignore others as irrelevant, dismiss some pieces of evidence out of hand and accept others without question.  We're always taking what we experience and comparing it to our own mental frameworks, deciding what is important and what isn't.  When my wife finished her most recent art piece -- a stunning image of a raven's face, set against a crimson background -- and I was on social media later that day and saw another piece of art someone had posted with a raven against red -- I shrugged and laughed and said, "Weird coincidence."

Quoth the Raven, pen/ink/watercolor by Carol Bloomgarden (2025) [Image used with permission]

But that's only because I had already decided that odd synchronicities don't mean anything.  If I had a mental model that considered such chance occurrences as spiritually significant omens, I would have interpreted that very, very differently.

Our mental frameworks are essential, but they can lead us astray as often as they land us on the right answer.  Consider, for example, the strange, sad case of Johann Beringer and the "lying stones."

Johann Bartholomeus Adam Beringer was a professor of medicine at the University of Würzburg in the early eighteenth century.  His training was in anatomy and physiology, but he had a deep interest in paleontology, and had a large collection of fossils he'd found during hikes in his native Germany.  He was also a devout Lutheran and a biblical literalist, so he interpreted all the fossil evidence as consistent with biblical events like the six-day creation, the Noachian flood, and so on.

Unfortunately, he also had a reputation for being arrogant, humorless, and difficult to get along with.  This made him several enemies, including two of his coworkers -- Ignace Roderique, a professor of geography and algebra, and Johann Georg von Eckhart, the university librarian.  So Roderique and von Eckhart hatched a plan to knock Beringer down a peg or two.

They found out where he was planning on doing his next fossil hunt, and planted some fake fossils along the way.

These "lying stones" are crudely carved from limestone.  On some of them, you can still see the chisel marks.

More outlandish still, Roderique and von Eckhart carved the word "God" in Hebrew on the backs of some of them.  Making it look like the artisan had signed His name, so to speak.

One colleague -- who was not in on the prank -- looked at the stones, and said to Beringer, "Um... are you sure?  Those look like chisel marks."  Beringer dismissed his objections, and in fact, turned them into evidence for his explanation.  Beringer wrote, "...the figures... are so exactly fitted to the dimensions of the stones, that one would swear that they are the work of a very meticulous sculptor...[and they] seem to bear unmistakable indications of the sculptor's knife."

They were so perfect, Beringer said, that they could only be the work of God.

So as astonishing as it may seem, Beringer fell for the ruse hook, line, and sinker.  Roderique and von Eckhart, buoyed up by their success, repeated their prank multiple times.  Finally Beringer had enough "fossils" that in 1726, he published a scholarly work called Lithographiae Wirceburgensis (The Writing-Stones of Würzburg).  But shortly after the book's publication -- it's unclear how -- Beringer realized he'd been taken for a ride.

He sued Roderique and von Eckhart for defamation -- and won.  Roderique and von Eckhart were both summarily fired, but it was too late; Beringer was a laughingstock in the scientific community.  He tried to recover all of the copies of his book and destroy them, but finally gave up.  His reputation was reduced to rubble, and he died twelve years later in total obscurity.

It's easy to laugh at Beringer's credulity, but the only reason you're laughing is because if you found such a "fossil," your mental model would immediately make you doubt its veracity.  In his framework -- which included a six-thousand-year-old Earth, a biblical flood, and a God who was perfectly capable of signing his own handiwork -- he didn't even stop to consider it.

The history of science is laden with missteps caused by biased mental models.  In 1790, a report of a fireball over France that strewed meteorites over a large region prompted a scientific paper -- that laughingly dismissed the claim as "impossible."  Pierre Bertholon, editor of the Journal des Sciences Utiles, wrote, "How sad, is it not, to see a whole municipality attempt to certify the truth of folk tales… the philosophical reader will draw his own conclusions regarding this document, which attests to an apparently false fact, a physically impossible phenomenon."  DNA was dismissed as the genetic code for decades, because of the argument that DNA's alphabet only contains four "letters," so the much richer twenty-letter alphabet of proteins (the amino acids) must be the language of the genes.  Even in the twentieth century, geologists didn't bother looking for evidence for continental drift until the 1950s, long after there'd been significant clues that the continents had, in fact, moved, largely because they couldn't imagine a mechanism that could be responsible.

Our mental models work on every level -- all the way down to telling us what questions are worth investigating.

So poor Johann Beringer.  Not to excuse him for being an arrogant prick, but he didn't deserve to be the target of a mean-spirited practical joke, nor does he deserve our derision now.  He was merely operating within his own framework of understanding, same as you and I do.

I wonder what we're missing, simply because we've decided it's irrelevant -- and what we've accepted as axiomatic, and therefore beyond questioning?

Maybe we're not so very far ahead of Beringer ourselves.

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