The cost of regret

One of the most tragicomic moments in my life happened at my twentieth high school reunion.

I was painfully shy when I was young.  I brought the concept of "awkward teenager" to its absolute apex.  I made some passing attempts to fit in, but those were by and large failures.  I did have a few friends -- some of whom I am still in touch with, and whose friendship I treasure -- but to say I had no social life back then is an odds-on favorite for Understatement of the Year.

Anyhow, I was at the evening dance/party for my reunion, and did what I usually do at parties: got a drink and then stood around looking uncomfortable.  While I was standing there, I was approached by a woman on whom, when we were in high school, I had a crush of life-threatening proportions.  She came up and started chatting with me, and I relaxed a little, especially I after silently reassured myself that we weren't teenagers any more, and that I was indeed twenty years older than I had been when I graduated.

The conversation went here and there, and after a while she blushed a little and said, "I have a confession to make.  When we were in high school, I had a terrible crush on you, but I was too nervous to ask you out."

I goggled at her for a moment, and said, "Well, that's a little ironic..." and told her I'd felt the same way, and didn't ask her out for the same reason.

We had a good laugh over it, but really, it's kind of sad, isn't it?  We're so wrapped up in our neuroses and insecurities that we become our own worst enemies -- passing up opportunities that could have been rewarding purely out of fear.

Later that evening, in my hotel room, I spent an inordinate amount of time beating myself up over having been such a coward, and avoiding emotional risks whenever it was possible.  I spent a lot of time on that most fruitless of pursuits -- trying to map out what would have happened had I been braver.  I was put in mind of the poignant passage from C. S. Lewis's novel Prince Caspian, do you know it?

"But what would have been the good?" Lucy asked.

Aslan said nothing.

"You mean," said Lucy rather faintly, "that it would have turned out all right – somehow?  But how?  Please, Aslan!  Am I not to know?"

"To know what would have happened, child?" said Aslan.  "No. Nobody is ever told that."

"Oh dear," said Lucy.

"But anyone can find out what will happen," said Aslan.  "If you go back to the others now, and wake them up; and tell them you have seen me again; and that you must all get up at once and follow me – what will happen?  There is only one way of finding out."

When I first read this -- age about fifteen or so -- I remember being thunderstruck, because on some level I'd already recognized that one of the most consistent themes of my life was regret at not having made different decisions.  People I dearly wish I had not hurt.  Opportunities I passed up because of my shyness and risk-aversion.  And sadly, I didn't learn from these experiences, but allowed them to drive me further into avoidance.  I seemed to spend most of the following years planting my feet, mule-like, in a desperate attempt not to misstep, not recognizing that refusing to choose was itself a choice.

So of course it kept happening.  My (all things considered) terrible choice not to fight against my parents' decision that I should live at home while going to college.  My (at the time) barely-acknowledged choice to keep my bisexuality hidden for decades.

It's not, mind you, that I'm unhappy with my life as it is. I have a wonderful wife, two sons I'm proud of, and spent 32 years in a rewarding career that I discovered quite by accident, as a consequence of other seemingly unrelated decisions I made.  I have twenty-four books in print, something I have dreamed about since elementary school.  I live in a wonderful part of the world, and have had the good fortune to travel and see dozens of other amazing places.

And I'm well aware of the fact that things could have turned out far worse. Whatever else you can say about the decision, my choice to live at home during college, with conservative, strait-laced parents who kept close tabs on me, kept me out of all sorts of trouble I might otherwise have gotten into.  If I'd come out as bisexual in college, it would have been in around 1980 -- and this was right at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, when the disease was still poorly understood, and a diagnosis was tantamount to a death sentence.

There's any number of ways the course of my life could have been deflected into an alternate path, and led me to somewhere very different, for better or worse.  Big decisions -- where to go to college, who to marry, what career to pursue.  Tiny actions with big effects, such as Donna Noble's choice of which direction to turn at an intersection in the mind-blowing Doctor Who episode "Turn Left" -- and of which in my own case I'm almost certainly unaware because looking back, they seem entirely insignificant.

As I said, I like my life just fine.  Even so, I've never been able to shuck the regret, and more than that the fact that like Lucy Pevensie in Prince Caspian, I'll never know what would have happened had I done otherwise.

The topic comes up because of a fascinating paper in the journal Psychological Science called "The Lure of Counterfactual Curiosity: People Incur a Cost to Experience Regret," by Lily FitzGibbon and Kou Muryama (of the University of Reading), and Asuka Komiya (of Hiroshima University).  They did a risk/choice/reward assessment task with 150 adults, and after the task was completed, the volunteers were allowed to pay for information about how they would have fared had they chosen differently.

It turns out, people are willing to pay a lot, even when they find out that they chose poorly (i.e. they would have had a greater reward had they made a different choice), and even though knowledge of their poor decision causes regret, self-doubt, and worse performance on subsequent tasks.  The authors write:

After one makes a decision, it is common to reflect not only on the outcome that was achieved but also on what might have been.  For example, one might consider whether going to a party would have been more fun than staying home to work on a manuscript.  These counterfactual comparisons can have negative emotional consequences; they can lead to the experience of regret. In the current study, we examined a commonly observed yet understudied aspect of counterfactual comparisons: the motivational lure of counterfactual information—counterfactual curiosity.  Specifically, we found that people are so strongly seduced to know counterfactual information that they are willing to incur costs for information about how much they could have won, even if the information is likely to trigger negative emotions (regret) and is noninstrumental to obtaining rewards.

Why would people seek out information when they know ahead of time it is likely to make them feel bad?  The authors write:

One explanation for seeking negative information is that people may also find it interesting to test their emotional responses—a mechanism that might also underlie so-called morbid curiosity.  Counterfactual information of the kind sought in the current experiments may be desirable because it has high personal relevance—it relates to decisions that one has made in the recent past.  People’s desire for information about their own performance is known to be strong enough to overcome cognitive biases such as inequality aversion.  Thus, opportunities to learn about oneself and the actual and counterfactual consequences of one’s decisions may have powerful motivational status.

Chances are, if I was able to do what Donna did in "Turn Left" and see the outcome had I chosen differently, I'd find the results for my life's path would be better in some aspects and worse in others.  Like everything, it's a mixed bag.  Given the opportunity to go back in time and actually change something -- well, tempting as it would be, I would be mighty hesitant to take that step and risk everything I currently have and have accomplished.

But still -- I'd like to know.  Even if in some cases, I'd have done far better making a different choice, and then would add the certainty of having made a bad decision on top of the more diffuse regret I already have.  The temptation to find out would be almost irresistible.

Maybe it's better, honestly, that we don't see the long-term consequences of our actions.  Fortunate, to put it in Aslan's words, that "Nobody is ever told that."  It's hard enough living with knowing you fell short or behaved badly; how much worse would it be if we saw that things could have been far better if we'd only chosen differently?

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The four-alarm fire

I present to you three recent articles with a linked theme.

The first is about a study at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute for Medical Research in Australia, and describes an mRNA vaccine that appears to be capable of stopping malaria in its tracks.  The impact of malaria is astonishing, a fact that often escapes the notice of those of us who live in temperate parts of the world where it doesn't occur.  I still remember my shock, when one of my biology professors asked what species of animal has caused more human deaths than any other -- in fact, more than all the other animals combined.

Turns out, of course, it's the mosquito.  Between malaria, yellow fever, and dengue, and a host of other less-common diseases like chikungunya, eastern equine encephalitis, and West Nile virus, mosquitoes (actually several species, but lumping them together for the sake of simplicity) have by far outstripped all other animals in their negative impact on humans.  And of the diseases they carry, malaria is the worst, infecting an estimated three hundred million people per year, and causing six hundred thousand annual fatalities.

The new vaccine is, like the COVID-19 vaccine, an activated piece of messenger RNA.  In this case, it targets a gene in the malaria microorganism that is essential to the pathogen's reproduction within the mosquito.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Supyyyy, Double-stranded RNA, CC BY-SA 4.0]

In preclinical trials, the vaccine caused a 99.7% drop in transmission rates.  The potential impact of a therapy with this efficacy is astronomical, especially given that post-infection medical treatment for malaria is of limited benefit -- and has to be administered for the remainder of the patient's life.  A vaccine that could stop malaria transmission almost completely would have as great a positive effect on life in equatorial regions of the world as the smallpox and polio vaccines did globally in the twentieth century.

The second is a series of studies having to do with the use of mRNA vaccines to target cancer.  The difficulty with conventional chemotherapy is that it's hard to find chemicals that kill tumor cells without damaging your own tissues; as I'm sure many of you know all too well, chemotherapy drugs often come along with miserable and long-lasting side effects.  The effectiveness of mRNA cancer treatments is that the strand of mRNA can be designed to target tumor-specific antigens, turning them into what amount to "smart bombs" that destroy cancerous tissues without harming the rest of the body.  The therapy has been demonstrated to be useful against a variety of types of cancer, including the deadly and extremely hard to treat pancreatic cancer.  There has even been dramatic work done that has raised the possibility of a universal cancer vaccine -- something about which University of Florida researcher Duane Mitchell said, "What we found is by using a vaccine designed not to target cancer specifically but rather to stimulate a strong immunologic response, we could elicit a very strong anticancer reaction.  And so this has significant potential to be broadly used across cancer patients — even possibly leading us to an off-the-shelf cancer vaccine."

The third is that the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., just announced that he's canceling five hundred million dollars in funding for the development of mRNA vaccines.

Let me be blunt, here.

This action will kill people.

Not that RFK cares.  His dangerous lies were directly responsible for the vaccine avoidance that caused a devastating outbreak of measles in Samoa that killed eighty people, mostly children -- an action for which he has yet to take responsibility.  (This, of course, is hardly surprising; "It's someone else's fault" should be the new motto of the GOP.)

RFK has built his entire stance on lies.  He called the COVID-19 vaccine "the deadliest vaccine ever made," despite the CDC finding that vaccination saved more than two hundred thousand lives during the peak of the pandemic.  He has claimed without any scientific basis that all mRNA vaccines are dangerous, and in fact has talked about it in such a way as to lead people to believe that mRNA itself is a dangerous chemical, despite the fact that anyone who passed high school biology should recognize how ridiculous this is.  (I actually saw someone post, apparently seriously, that they would "never allow mRNA in their body," to which I responded, "good luck with that.")

I know there's some stiff competition, but I think RFK would top the list of the Most Dangerous Trump Appointees.  His fear-based, anti-science policies are going to directly result in deaths -- if we're lucky, it'll only be in the thousands, but if we have another pandemic, it could well be in the millions.  The scariest part is that I have no idea what we can do about it.  Besides not taking responsibility, the other thing the Republicans seem to be awfully good at is not bowing to pressure from knowledgeable experts.  In fact, being countered makes them double down and hang on even harder.

And can I point out here that almost half of the research funding RFK cut could be offset by canceling the plans for Trump's fucking Versailles-wannabe golden ballroom?

This is a four-alarm fire, and it seems like barely anyone is paying attention.  Certainly no one who can do anything about it.  This goes way beyond whether any of us will be able to get flu and COVID boosters this fall; this is about basic medical research that can save countless lives.  But ignorance and anti-science dogmatism are winning at the moment.

I just hope that we won't have to wait until a deadly global pandemic for people to wake up and start objecting -- and getting this ignorant, dramatically unqualified ideologue out of a position he never should have been appointed to in the first place.

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Trials and tribulations

A friend of mine posted a link on social media about how forty percent of Republicans approve of how Donald Trump has handled the whole horrible mess surrounding the incriminating written records from convicted pedophiles Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, despite the fact that the way he's handled it is (1) denying the records exist, (2) saying that the records don't include him, (3) saying that Obama created the records to slander him, and (4) saying okay, but Bill Clinton is in there, too, so put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Apparently, a significant proportion of MAGA-inclined individuals think this is all just hunky-dory, and are capable of believing all four of these things simultaneously.

My friend appended a comment to the effect that the whole world has gone crazy.  And I certainly understand how he could reach that conclusion.  But still, I think he's got it wrong.

The world hasn't gone crazy.  The world is crazy.  The world has always been crazy.  It's just that because there are now eight billion people on the planet and a lot of us are electronically connected, the craziness is amplified more, and spreads faster, than before.

But people?  People have always been loony, or at least a great many of them.  And here's another thing; that saying about "the cream always rises to the top" is patent nonsense.  Yeah, the situation right now is pretty extreme, but a lot of our previous presidents were nothing to brag about.  I mean, Nixon?  George W. Bush?  Reagan?  I think writer Dave Barry hit closer to the mark: "When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command.  Very often, that person is crazy."

But if you still think today's leaders (and the ones who support them) are any nuttier than those in the past, allow me to introduce you to Pope Stephen VI.

Stephen was pope for only a little over a year, from May 896 to August 897.  He started out as a priest in Rome, but other than that we know little about his background.  Apparently in 892 he was appointed as bishop of Anangni "against his will" by the pope at the time, one Formosus.

Formosus died on April 11, 896, and was succeeded by Pope Boniface VI, who reigned for fifteen days.  (Amazingly, he's not the pope with the shortest reign; that dubious honor goes to Urban VII, who died of malaria twelve days after getting the nod from the College of Cardinals.)  Boniface supposedly died of gout, but given that the church historian Caesar Baronius called him a "disgusting monster guilty of adultery and homicide," it's possible he was given a little help in shuffling off this mortal coil.

Anyhow, the next guy to be elected was the reluctant bishop Stephen.  And this is when things really went off the rails.

Formosus had gotten himself involved in playing politics with the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire, which, as Voltaire quipped, was "neither Roman nor holy."  The current emperor was Lambert of Spoleto, whom Formosus himself had crowned, but in 893 the pope was becoming a little twitchy about how aggressive the Spoleto faction was getting, and decided to invite Arnulf of Carinthia, Lambert's rival, to Rome.

Formosus crowned him emperor too.

This would probably have devolved into a bloodbath had both Arnulf and Formosus not conveniently died within months of each other in 896.  Whew, disaster averted, right?  All settled, right?

Wrong.

Lambert of Spoleto and his redoubtable mother, Ageltrude, came to Rome, stomped into the papal residence, and said to the pope -- at this point Stephen VI -- "what the fuck, dude, I thought we had an agreement?"  Stephen babbled something to the effect that it hadn't been him who'd double-crossed Lambert, it'd been that rat Formosus, and what the hell do you want me to do about it anyway, he's already dead?

Dead-shmead, doesn't matter, Lambert said, and demanded that Stephen make amends.

So he did.

He dug up Formosus's rotting corpse and put it on trial.

Le Pape Formose et Etienne VI, by Jean-Paul Laurens (1870) [Image is in the Public Domain]

The problem was -- well, amongst the many problems was -- that Formosus couldn't exactly speak on his own behalf.  As James Randi put it, "It's easy to talk to the dead; the difficulty is in getting them to talk back."  So Stephen appointed a deacon to be the voice of Formosus's defense.

I'm sure you can predict how effective a strategy that was.

At one point, Stephen demanded of the corpse, "When you were bishop of Porto, why did you usurp the universal Roman See in such a spirit of ambition?", and the deacon didn't have a good answer.  In fact, since the deacon was one of Stephen's friends, he deliberately didn't have a good answer for anything.  In the end (surprise!) Formosus was found guilty, stripped of his papal vestments, had three fingers of his right hand (the ones used in papal blessings) cut off, and was interred in a graveyard for the poor.  Then Stephen decided this wasn't sufficient, so he dug up the corpse again, tied stones to it, and threw it into the Tiber River.  All of Formosus's official acts were revoked and invalidated.

This, unfortunately, included Stephen's appointment as bishop of Anangni, but it took everyone a while to realize that.

Even this wasn't the end of it, though.  Despite being weighted down, the corpse washed up on the shores of the river, and people started claiming that touching it had worked miracles.  Cured the ill, made the lame walk, that sort of thing.  Maybe Formosus had been a holy man after all!  The public sentiment turned against Stephen, and he was deposed and arrested -- and one of the charges was that he'd become pope after telling everyone he was a bishop when he actually wasn't.  Given how widely he was hated, no one came up with the objection, "But... wasn't he the one who made the declaration that invalidated his own appointment as bishop?"  Didn't matter, as it turned out.  Stephen was strangled in prison in August of 897, after a reign of only fourteen months.  As for Formosus, his body was reclothed in the papal vestments and was reburied in St. Peter's Basilica, where he's remained ever since.  The next pope, Theodore II, only reigned for twenty days (cause of death unknown but highly suspicious), so he didn't have time to do much other than say "You know, I always thought Formosus was actually an okay guy," but the one after that, John IX (who reigned for a whole two years, which was pretty good for the time) rehabilitated Formosus completely, reinstated all of his official acts, excommunicated seven cardinals who'd gone along with the "Cadaver Synod," as it became known, and announced a prohibition against putting any more corpses on trial.

Which you'd think would be one of those things you wouldn't have to pass a law about.

So there's some prime grade-A craziness that shows our current lunacy is nothing new.  I've heard it seriously claimed that the Earth is the mental ward of the universe; no less a luminary than George Bernard Shaw said, "The longer I live, the more convinced I am that this planet is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum."  I doubt Shaw was completely serious, but you know, I think he had a point.  And it's cold comfort to realize that the kind of insanity we're living through now has been going on for a very long time, given that at the moment we're stuck in the middle of it.

Humans seem to be capable of some serious nuttiness, and it all gets amplified a thousandfold when the nuts end up in charge.  But it bears keeping in mind that the nuts wouldn't end up in charge if it weren't for the support of lots of ordinary people, so we can't so easily absolve ourselves of the blame.

But "at least Donald Trump hasn't dug up a dead guy and put him on trial" is kind of a weak reassurance.  Especially since you can always follow that up with a powerful little word:

"... yet."

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Old as the hills

In northwestern Australia, there's an administrative region called Pilbara.

Even though on a map, it looks kind of long and narrow, it's big.  The area of Pilbara is just shy of that of California and Nevada put together.  (I suspect that I'm like many non-Australians in consistently forgetting just how big Australia is.  It's the sixth largest country in the world, and is almost the same size as the continental United States.  Flying from Sydney to Perth is comparable to flying from Atlanta to Los Angeles.)

Pilbara is also extremely hot and dry, and very sparsely populated, with only a bit over sixty thousand residents total, most of whom live in the western third of the region.  The northeastern quadrant is part of the aptly-named Great Sandy Desert, one of the most inhospitable places on Earth.  There are only a few Indigenous tribes that somehow eke out a living there, most notably the Martu, but by and large it's uninhabited.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Brian Voon Yee Yap, aka Yewenyi, at en.wikipedia]

What brings up the topic, though, is that Pilbara is interesting for another reason than its hostile climate.

It is the home to some of the oldest rocks on Earth.

The Pilbara Craton -- a craton is a contiguous piece of continental crust -- is estimated to be around three and a half billion years old.  For reference, the Earth's crust only solidified 4.4 billion years ago.  Since that time, plate tectonics took over, and as I've described before, tectonic processes excel at recycling crust.  At collisional margins such as trenches and convergent zones, usually one piece slides under the other and is melted as it sinks.  Even in places where two thick, cold continental plates run into each other -- examples are the Alps and the Himalayas -- the rocks are deformed, buried, or eroded.

The result is we have very few really old rocks left.  The only ones even on the same time scale as Pilbara are the Barberton Greenstone Belt of South Africa and the Canadian Shield (and even the latter has been heavily metamorphosed since its formation).

This makes Pilbara a great place to research if you're interested in the conditions of the Precambrian Earth -- as long as you can tolerate lots of sand, temperatures that often exceed 36 C, and a fun kind of grass called Triodia that has leaf margins made of silica.

Better known as glass.

Frolicking in a field of Triodia is like running through a meadow made of Exacto knives.

Be that as it may, geologists and paleontologists have begun a thorough study of this fascinating if forbidding chunk of rock.  The most recent reconstructions suggest that both Pilbara and the aforementioned Barberton Greenstone were once part of an equatorial supercontinent called Vaalbara (which preceded the supercontinent most people think of -- Pangaea -- by a good three billion years).  And those might be the only chunks of that enormous piece of land left intact.

There are two other reasons Pilbara is remarkable.

It contains numerous fossilized stromatolites, which are layered sedimentary structures formed by cyanobacteria, thought to be the earliest photosynthetic life forms.  There are still stromatolites forming today -- probably not coincidentally, in shallow bays in Western Australia.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons photographer Paul Harrison (Reading UK), March 2005, Stromatolites growing in Hamelin Pool Marine Nature Reserve, Shark Bay in Western Australia.]

As such, the Pilbara stromatolite fossils are the oldest certain traces of life on Earth, dating to 3.48 billion years ago.

The other reason is that it's also home to a massive impact crater dating to 3.47 billion years ago.  Shortly after those earliest, tentative life forms were living and thriving in the warm shallow ocean waters, a huge meteorite struck near what is now the town of Marble Bar, forming a crater and shatter cone between 16 and 45 kilometers in diameter (because of erosion, it's hard even for the geologists to determine where its edges lie).  The resulting Miralga Impact Structure blew tremendous amounts of molten debris up into the air, and some of it landed on that chunk of Vaalbara that would eventually end up in South Africa -- only to be recovered by geologists almost three and a half billion years later.

So there's a place in Australia that gives new meaning to the phrase "old as the hills."  Given its remoteness and inhospitable climate, I'm unlikely ever to visit there, but there's something appealing about the idea.  Walking on rock that is an intact remnant of a continent from over three billion years ago is kind of awe-inspiring.  Even if all the other rock is still here somewhere -- melted and reformed and eroded multiple times -- the idea that this chunk of the Earth has somehow lasted that long more or less intact is mighty impressive.

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Backfire

One of the many things that baffles me about my fellow humans is how hard it is for people to say, "Well, I guess I was wrong, then."

I mean, I'm sure I've got as many idées fixes as the next guy.  There are parts of my worldview I'm pretty attached to, and models for how the universe works that I would be absolutely astonished to find out were incorrect.  But I'd like to think that if I were to be presented with hard evidence, I'd have no choice but to shrug aside my astonishment and say it.

"Well, I guess I was wrong, then."

This attitude, however, seems to be in the minority.  Many more people will hang onto their preconceived notions like grim death, sometimes even denying evidence that is right in front of their eyes.  I distinctly recall one student who, despite being a young-earth creationist, elected to take my AP Biology class, about which I was up front that it was taught from an evolutionary perspective.  She was quite friendly and not at all antagonistic, and one time I asked her what her basis was for rejecting the evolutionary model.  Did she doubt the evidence?  Did it strike her as an illogical stance?  Did the whole thing simply not make sense to her?

No, she assured me -- she knew the evidence was real (and overwhelming); the whole argument was impeccably logical and made good sense to her.

She simply didn't believe it.  Despite all of the science she knew (and excelled at; she damn near aced my class, which was no mean feat), she simply knew that the Bible was literally true.

I didn't question further -- my aim, after all, was understanding, not conversion -- but I left the conversation feeling nothing but puzzlement.  My only conclusion was that she defined the word knowledge very differently than I did.

To take a less emotionally-charged example, let me tell you a story about a man named John Murray Spear.

Spear was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1804, and from a young age attended the Universalist Church, eventually studying theology and being ordained.  He became minister of the congregation in Barnstable, and using his position fought for a bunch of righteous causes -- women's rights, labor reform, the abolition of slavery, and the elimination of the death penalty.

Spear, though, had another set of interests that were a little... odder.

He was a thoroughgoing Spiritualist, believing not only in the afterlife -- after all, that belief is shared by most Christian sects -- but that the spirits of the dead could and did communicate with the living.  He delved into the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and Franz Mesmer, both of whom had attempted to give a scientific basis for spirit survival (and for the related belief in a soul as a substance or energy independent of the body).  Spear's obsession eventually brought him into conflict with the Universalist Church leaders, and in the end he followed his heart, giving up his ministerial position and breaking all ties with the church.

In 1852 he wrote a tract in which he claimed to be in contact with a group called the "Association of Electrizers," which included not only Spear's namesake, the Universalist minister John Murray, but Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Benjamin Rush.

You have probably already figured out that all of these men were dead at the time.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

This didn't stop Spear.  He produced documents with texts from Murray et al., and which included their signatures.  Asked by skeptics how ghosts could sign their names, Spear claimed that okay, he'd held the pen, but the ghosts had guided his hand.  The texts contained information on how to combine technology and Spiritualism to create a source of energy that would elevate humanity to new levels, so he set about building a machine in a shed on a hill in Lynn, Massachusetts that he claimed would release a "New Motive Power" using a "messianic perpetual motion machine."

Whatever the fuck that means.

So Spear and a few followers got to work building their machine out of copper wire, zinc plates, magnets, and one (1) dining room table.  After months of effort, Spear and an unnamed woman he called "the New Mary" held a ceremony where they "ritualistically birthed" the machine in an attempt to give it life.  Then they turned it on.

Nothing happened.

After a couple more abortive attempts to get it going, Spear's Spiritualist friends got fed up, destroyed the machine, and told Spear he could go to hell.

This is the point where you'd think anyone would have said that magic phrase -- "Well, I guess I was wrong, then."  Not Spear.  Spear became even more determined.  He seemed to follow that famous example of a faulty logical chain, "Many geniuses were laughed at in their time.  I'm being laughed at, so I must be a genius."  He kept at it for another two decades, never achieving success, which you no doubt could have predicted by my use of the phrase "perpetual motion machine."  It was only in 1872 that he said he'd received a message from the Association of Electrizers telling him it was time to retire.

But until his death in Philadelphia in 1887, he handed out business cards to all and sundry saying, "Guided and assisted by beneficent Spirit-Intelligences, Mr. S. will examine and prescribe for disease of body and mind, will delineate the character of persons when present, or by letter, and indicate their future as impressions are given him; will sketch the special capacities of young persons...  Applications to lecture, or hold conversations on Spiritualism, will be welcomed."

On the one hand, you have to admire Spear's tenacity.  On the other... well, how much evidence do you need?  Surely on some level he was aware that he was making it all up, right?  He doesn't seem to have simply been mentally ill; his writings on other topics show tremendous lucidity.

But he had an idea that he wanted to be true so badly that he just couldn't resign himself to its falsehood.

I have to wonder, though, if there might be a strain of that in all of us.  How would I react if I learned something that completely overturned my understanding?  Would I really shift ground as easily as I claim, or would I cling tenaciously to my preconceived notions?  I wonder how big a catastrophe in my thinking it would take to make me rebel, and like my long-ago student, say, "Okay, I see it, I understand it, but I don't believe it"?

It's easy for me to chuckle at Spear with his Association of Electrizers and New Motive Forces and messianic perpetual motion machines, but honestly, it's because I already didn't believe in any of that stuff.  Maybe I'm as locked into my worldview as he was.  As journalist Kathryn Schulz put it, "Okay, we all know we're fallible, but in a purely theoretical sense.  Try to think of one thing, right now, that you're wrong about.  You can't, can you?"

The facile response is, "Of course not, because if I knew I was wrong, I would change my mind," but I think that misses the point.  We all are trapped in our own conceptual frameworks, and fight like mad when anything threatens them.  The result is that most of us can be presented with arguments showing us that we're wrong, and we still don't change our minds.  Sometimes, in fact, being challenged makes us hang on even harder.  It's so common that psychologists have invented a name for the phenomenon -- the backfire effect.

Perhaps Spear is not that much of an aberration after all.  And how is this desperate clinging to being right at the heart of the political morass we currently find ourselves in here in the United States?

Once again, how much evidence do you need? 

So those are my rather depressing thoughts for the day.  A nineteenth-century Spiritualist, and an attitude that is still all too common today.  At least, for all Spear's unscientific claptrap, he still found time to support some important causes, which is more than I can say for the modern crop of evidence-deniers.

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Thunderbolts and lightning (very very frightening)

The cause of lightning has been strangely elusive.

Oh, in the broadest-brush terms, we've understood it for a while.  The rapidly-rising column of air in a cumulonimbus cloud induces charge separation, resulting in an electric potential difference between the ground and the air.  At a potential of about three megavolts per meter, the dielectric strength of damp air is exceeded -- the maximum voltage it can withstand without the molecules ionizing, and becoming conductive to electrical current.  This creates a moving channel of ionized air called a stepped leader.  When the leader reaches the ground, the overall resistance between the ground and the cloud drops dramatically, and discharge occurs, called the return stroke.  This releases between two hundred megajoules and seven gigajoules of energy in a fraction of a second, heating the air column to around thirty thousand degrees Celsius -- five times hotter than the surface of the Sun.

That's the origin of both the flash of light and the shock wave in the air that we hear as thunder.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Maxime Raynal from France, Port and lighthouse overnight storm with lightning in Port-la-Nouvelle, CC BY 2.0]

The problem is, there was no consensus on what exactly caused the very first step -- the charge separation in the cloud that triggers the voltage difference.  Some scientists believed that it was friction between the air and the updrafting raindrops (and hail) characteristic of a thundercloud, similar to the way you can induce a static charge on a balloon by rubbing it against your shirt.  But experiments weren't able to confirm that, and most places you look, you'll see words like "still being investigated" and "uncertain at best" and "poorly understood process."

Until now.

A team of scientists led by Victor Pasko of Pennsylvania State University have shown that the initiation of lightning is caused by a literal perfect storm of conditions.  They found that free "seed" electrons, knocked loose by cosmic rays, are accelerating into the rapidly-rising air column at "relativistic" speeds -- i.e., a significant fraction of the speed of light -- and then ram into nitrogen and oxygen atoms.  These collisions trigger a shower of additional electrons, causing an avalanche, which is then swept upward into the upper parts of the cloud.

This is what causes the charge separation, the voltage difference between top and bottom, and the eventual discharge we see as lightning.

It also produces electromagnetic radiation across the spectrum from radio waves to gamma rays, something that had been observed but never explained.

"By simulating conditions with our model that replicated the conditions observed in the field, we offered a complete explanation for the X-rays and radio emissions that are present within thunderclouds," Pasko said.  "We demonstrated how electrons, accelerated by strong electric fields in thunderclouds, produce X-rays as they collide with air molecules like nitrogen and oxygen, and create an avalanche of electrons that produce high-energy photons that initiate lightning...  [T]he high-energy X-rays produced by relativistic electron avalanches generate new seed electrons driven by the photoelectric effect in air, rapidly amplifying these avalanches.  In addition to being produced in very compact volumes, this runaway chain reaction can occur with highly variable strength, often leading to detectable levels of X-rays, while accompanied by very weak optical and radio emissions.  This explains why these gamma-ray flashes can emerge from source regions that appear optically dim and radio silent."

There's still a lot left to explain, however.  Also this week, a paper came out of Arizona State University about the astonishing "megaflash" that occurred in October 2017, where a single lightning bolt traveled over eight hundred kilometers -- from eastern Texas all the way to Kansas City.  Even though the megaflash dropped some cloud-to-ground leaders along the way, it didn't discharge completely until the very end.  Megaflashes are rare, but what conditions could lead to a main stepped leader (and the corresponding return stroke) extending that far before grounding are unknown.

So like with all good science, the new research answers some questions and raises others.  Here in upstate New York we're in thunderstorm season, and while we don't get the crazy storms they see in the southeast and midwest, we've had some powerful ones this summer.  I've always liked a good storm, as long as the lightning stays away from my house.  A friend of ours had his house struck by lightning a few years ago and it fried his electrical system (including his computer) -- something that leads me to unplug my laptop and router as soon as I hear rumbling.

Even if the mechanisms of lightning are now less mysterious, it's still just as dangerous.  Very very frightening, as Freddie Mercury observed.

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The green children

One of the strangest tales out of old England comes from the turbulent reign of King Stephen, which lasted from 1135 to 1154.

Stephen was the grandson of William the Conqueror; his mother, Adela of Normandy, was William's daughter.  When the legitimate heir to the throne, William Adelin (son of Henry I) died in the "sinking of the White Ship" in 1120, it set up a succession crisis as Henry had no other legitimate sons.  So when Henry died in 1135, Stephen seized the throne.

The problem was, Henry did have a legitimate daughter, Matilda, who basically said "Oh, hell no" (only in Norman French).  And honestly, Matilda's claim to the throne was better, according to the law of primogeniture.  But (1) Matilda was a woman, which back then was for some reason a serious problem, and (2) she was arrogant to the point of pissing off just about everyone she came into contact with.  Personality-wise, though, Stephen was not a lot better.  So they squared off against each other -- and thus began the First English Civil War.

The result was what always happens; years of back-and-forth-ing, and the ones who suffered most were the common people who just wanted to survive and put food on the table.  It wasn't helped by the fact that both Stephen and Matilda seemed to excel most at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.  Both of them came close to winning outright more than once, then did something so catastrophically boneheaded that they blew their chance.  (If you want an interesting perspective on the war against the backdrop of some entertaining fiction, Ellis Peters's charming Chronicles of Brother Cadfael are set during Stephen's reign.)

Eventually, everyone got fed up with it, including the two principals.  In 1153 Stephen more or less capitulated, and agreed that if Matilda would give up her claim to the throne and cease hostilities, he'd name her son Henry (the future King Henry II) as his heir.  Treaty signed.  Stephen only lived another two years, Henry became king, and the Plantagenet dynasty was founded.

So it was a mess, and in fact is sometimes called "the Anarchy," which isn't far off the mark.  And it was from during this chaos that we have the odd story of the "Green Children of Woolpit."

Woolpit is a town in Suffolk.  Its curious name has to do with wolves, not sheep; it was originally Wulfpytt -- a pit for catching wolves.  In any case, some time during the war, when things were at their worst, two children showed up in Woolpit, a boy and a girl.  They spoke no English (or French either, for that matter), only a strange language no one in the area recognized, and refused all food except for raw beans, which they ate voraciously.

Also, their skin was green.

Naturally, this raised more than a few eyebrows, but they were taken in by one Sir Richard de Calne, a nobleman of Norman descent who lived near Woolpit.  The boy died soon afterward, but the girl lived, was baptized with the name of Agnes, and gradually learned to speak English.  She adjusted to her new life, although remained "very wanton and impudent," according to one account.  When she was able, she told her caretakers that she and her brother had come from a land where the Sun never shone, and the sky was a perpetual twilight.  Everything there was green, she said.

The place was known as "St. Martin's Land."

The brother and sister had been herding their father's cattle, she told them, and had heard the sound of cathedral bells coming from a cave in a hillside.  Curious, they entered the cave, at first losing their way, but eventually coming out near where they were found in Woolpit.

Two contemporaneous writers, Ralph of Coggeshall and William of Newburgh, both give accounts of the Green Children, which substantially agree.  Over time the green color of Agnes's skin gradually faded until she looked more or less normal.  She eventually found work as a servant, but rose in status when she married Richard Barre, a scholar and justice who worked for both Henry II and Richard I.  The details of her later life are unknown.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rod Bacon, WoolpitSign, CC BY-SA 2.0]

So, what's going on, here?

First, it seems pretty certain that something real happened -- i.e., that it's not just a tall tale.  There are too many apparently independent references to the story to discount it entirely.  Needless to say, though, I'm not inclined to believe that they were aliens, or some of the Fair Folk, or any of the other fanciful quasi-explanations I've heard.  It's been suggested that the green color of their skin was due to hypochromic anemia (also known as chlorosis), which can be caused by chronic iron deficiency, which would explain why the coloration went away in Agnes's skin once she had a better diet.

It's also been suggested that their lack of knowledge of English was because they were Flemish.  Both Stephen and Matilda had invited in Flemish mercenaries to help them in the war, and some of these settled in England permanently.  It might be that they were the children of some of these Flemish settlers.

But.

If the cause of the green coloration really was malnourishment, the condition should have been much more widespread, because as I noted earlier, during the First English Civil War just about everyone was starving.  And hypochromic anemia doesn't really make you green, it makes your skin waxy, yellowish, and pale.  The children's green color was striking enough to merit emphasis, which suggests strongly that it was something no one who saw the children had ever seen before.  As far as their being Flemish, their guardian, Sir Richard de Calne, was a well-educated nobleman; both of the principle chroniclers, Ralph of Coggeshall and William of Newburgh, were multilingual.  There is no way that if the children had been speaking Flemish, none of them would have recognized it, especially given how many Flemish soldiers and merchants were in England at the time.

Plus, if all the children had done was go through a cave in a hill and come out of the other side, they can't have been far from home.  We're talking Suffolk, in flat East Anglia (Suffolk's highest elevation is only 128 meters!), not the freakin' Rocky Mountains, here.  Why did both of the children think they'd been transported far away -- far enough away that they couldn't just walk back across the hill and then home?  (It's possible, of course, that they had been abused and didn't want to go home.  But still.  Surely if all they'd done was cross a few hills, someone would have recognized them as locals.)

So the prosaic, rational explanation of the story doesn't itself hold up to scrutiny.

Likewise, claims that the story of the Green Children was a moralistic tale invented as a social commentary on "the threat posed by outsiders to the unity of the Christian community," as historian Elizabeth Freeman put it. seem as far-fetched as suggestions that they were aliens.  As I said earlier, the independent accounts of the children, as well as their interactions with real historical figures, indicate that they did exist -- whoever they were, and wherever they'd come from.

So we're left with a mystery that I doubt will ever be resolved to everyone's satisfaction.

Understand that I'm not advocating for any kind of paranormal explanation; whatever did happen back in twelfth-century Suffolk, I'm sure it had a rational, scientific cause.  I'm just saying we don't know what it is.  Odd to think, though, that since Richard Barre and Agnes had children, very likely there are people in Suffolk (and those with ancestry there) who descend from the surviving "Green Child."

If you're one of them, consider where that drop of your blood might have come from.  And let me know if you ever find yourself with a craving for raw beans.

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