The polymath

Nobel Prize-winning Hungarian biochemist Albert von Szent-Györgyi once made the pithy observation that "Discovery consists of seeing what everyone else has seen, and thinking what no one else has thought."

I think that's really what sets apart the scientists from the rest of us -- that ability to go from "wow, that's weird!" to "... and here's how I think it works."  But there's another piece, too, that has unfortunately been lost over time through the sad fact of increasing specialization within the sciences.

And that's the ability to be conversant in a great many different disciplines, and the capacity for drawing connections between them.

Another accurate observation -- this one, I haven't been able to find an attestation for -- is that "Researchers these days are learning more and more about less and less, until finally they're going to know everything about nothing."  One of my mentors, science educator Roger Olstad, called this "focusing on one cubic millimeter of the universe," and said that generalists make better teachers, because they can draw on information from lots of disparate fields in order to make sense of their subject for students.  Fortunately for me; I'm an inveterate dabbler.  I'd have been a lousy candidate for a doctoral program, because I don't seem to be able to keep my mind locked on one thing for five minutes, much less the five years or more you have to focus in order to research and write a dissertation.

What's kind of sad, though, is that it hasn't always been this way.  Before the twentieth century, scientists were almost all polymaths; it behooves us all to remember that the word science itself comes from the Latin scientia, which simply means "knowledge."  Consider, for example, the following advances, all made in the latter half of the seventeenth century.  Do you know who was responsible for each?

• Made the first accurate measurements of motion of Jupiter's Great Red Spot, allowing the astronomer Giovanni Cassini to calculate the planet's rotational period
• Deduced the law of elasticity -- that for springs (or other elastic objects), the linear extension is directly proportional to the force exerted
• Made the first-ever drawing of a microorganism (the fungus Mucor)
• Figured out that the optimum shape for a weight-bearing dome is exactly the same as the curve of a hanging chain, only upside-down (the inverted catenary), revolutionizing architecture
• Was the first to note that venous and arterial blood differ in appearance, pressure, and composition
• Determined that the force of gravitation is an inverse-square law
• Figured out (through microscopic analysis) that petrified wood retains the cellular structure of the living wood it came from
• Studied waves in two-dimensional plates, and was the first to observe their nodal patterns (now called Chladni figures after an eighteenth-century physicist who did an extensive analysis of them)
• Built the first balance-spring pocketwatch
• Coined the term cell after seeing the microscopic holes in thin slices of cork, and likening them to the monks' quarters (celluli) in a monastery
• Concluded, from studying lunar craters, that the Moon must have its own gravity
• Was the first to analyze schlieren, the streaks caused when two transparent fluids with different indices of refraction mix (such as heat shimmer over a hot roadway, or when you stir simple syrup into water)
• Speculated that there was a specific component of air that allowed for respiration in animals -- and that both respiration and combustion gradually removed whatever that component was
• Developed the first clockwork drive for telescopes, allowing them to compensate for the Earth's rotation and track the movement of astronomical objects 

You're probably on to me by now, and figured out that these advances in diverse fields weren't made by different people.  They were all made by one man.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

His name was Robert Hooke.  He was born on the Isle of Wight in 1635 to an Anglican priest and his wife, and because of frail health wasn't given much in the way of formal education.  But his mechanical aptitude was evident from a really young age.  He was especially fascinated with clocks, and after studying the workings of a brass pendulum clock in his father's study, he went off and built himself one out of wood.

It worked.

He got the rudiments of drawing from a short-lived apprenticeship with painter Peter Lely, but once again his health interfered; according to an 1898 biography, "the smell of the Oil Colours did not agree with his Constitution, increasing his Head-ache to which he was ever too much subject."  So he went on to more generalized study, first at the Westminster School and then at the University of Oxford, from which he graduated in 1662.

Three years later, he'd accomplished so much he was appointed Curator for Life to the newly-founded Royal Society of London.

It's hard to exaggerate Hooke's contribution to Enlightenment science.  He was interested in everything.  And damn good at pretty much all of it.  The misses he had -- not beating Newton to the Universal Law of Gravitation, for example -- were more because he stopped pursuing a line of inquiry too soon, usually because he went on to some other pressing interest.

Hooke got a reputation for being prickly -- one biographer called him "cantankerous, envious, and vengeful" -- for his determination to get credit for his many discoveries.  This picture of Hooke as having a sour, grasping personality comes mainly from his conflict with two people; Christiaan Huygens (another remarkable polymath, who tangled with Hooke over who had the right to the patent for the balance-spring pocketwatch), and none other than Isaac Newton.

Newton was not a man to piss off.  Not only was he brilliant in his own right, he was apparently "cantankerous, envious, and vengeful."  He and Hooke started out at least on speaking terms, and exchanged some information with each other, but it very rapidly devolved into a vicious rivalry.  Newton, for his part, never did acknowledge that Hooke had any role in the development of the Universal Law of Gravitation.  In a 1680 letter, Newton wrote, "yet am I not beholden to [Hooke] for any light into that business but only for the diversion he gave me from my other studies to think on these things & for his dogmaticalness in writing as if he had found the motion in the Ellipses, which inclined me to try it ..."

There's an allegation -- disputed by some historians -- that when Newton was appointed president of the Royal Society at Hooke's death in 1703, Newton had all of Hooke's portraits destroyed.  The one surviving painting supposedly of Hooke is almost certainly not him, but of Flemish chemist Jan Baptiste van Helmont.  In fact, all we have left of Hooke's likeness for certain is an unflattering description of him from his friend John Aubrey: "He is but of midling stature, something crooked, pale-faced, and his face but little below, but his head is lardge, his eie full and popping, and not quick; a grey eie.  He has a delicate head of haire, browne, and of an excellent moist curle.  He is and ever was temperate and moderate in dyet."

His odd posture and appearance -- as well as his ongoing health problems -- are now thought to be due to the degenerative spine disease Scheuermann's kyphosis, which eventually led to his death at the age of 67.  But what he accomplished despite his physical handicaps is somewhere beyond remarkable.

Now, imagine if Hooke's career had begun in a typical Ph.D. program where he was told, "focus on one thing only."

Don't misunderstand me; I'm grateful for experts.  The current anti-expert bias in what passes for a government in my country is nothing short of idiotic.  It amounts to, "I'm going to discount this person who has spent her/his entire adult life studying this topic, in favor of some crank with a website."  But there's also room for the generalists -- people who aren't afraid to delve into whatever takes their fancy, and bring that breadth of experience to whatever they undertake.

People like the extraordinary polymath Robert Hooke.

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Apocalypse not

Well, it was nice knowing you all.

I have it on good authority that today is the Rapture, wherein Jesus reappears on Earth, selects a few of the Righteous and Holy to ascend back into Heaven with him, and leaves the rest of us slobs down here to contend with the Four Apocalyptic Horsepersons, the Scarlet Whore of Babylon, the Star Wormwood, the Beast With Seven Heads and Ten Crowns, and various other special offers created for our edification by the God of Goodness and Mercy.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalpyse, by Viktor Vasnetsov (1887) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Which brings up a question I've always wondered about: why did the Beast have seven heads, but ten crowns?  It seems like logically, the head:crown ratio should be 1:1.  Did he wear seven of them at a time, and kept three in his closet as spares?  Did he stand in front of the mirror each morning, deciding which seven he was going to wear that day?  I remember as a child, reading the Bible, picturing him as wearing one crown each on six of his heads and the remaining four stacked up on one head, and that mental image bothered the hell out of me.  It just seemed unnecessarily asymmetrical.  I recall trying to figure out if there was a way to make it work out better, and the best I could do was two crowns on heads one, four, and seven, and a single crown on each of the remaining ones.

I was kind of a neurotic child, which probably isn't a surprise to anyone.

Anyhow, I said that I found out today is the Rapture from good authority, but that may have been a slight exaggeration.  The place I read about it was the New York Post, which ranks only slightly above The Weekly World News in credibility.  The Post was quoting one Pastor Joshua Mhlakela, who made the announcement a couple of weeks ago.  "The Rapture is upon us, whether you are ready or not," Mhlakela said.  "I saw Jesus sitting on his throne, and I could hear him saying very loud and clear, 'I am coming soon.'  He said to me, 'On the 23rd and 24th of September, I will come back to Earth.'"

The optimists amongst us might expect that Mhlakela would immediately be dismissed by everyone, given that Wikipedia has a list of 162 "failed apocalypse predictions," along with dozens more that are supposed to happen in the future.  You would think after 162 times that people ran around with signs saying, "REPENT NOW, THE WORLD ENDS TODAY," and the next day came and the world just kept loping along as usual, people would shrug and laugh about any future prognostications of catastrophe.

You would be wrong.

Mhlakela's YouTube video has gotten millions of views, and the comments are, for the most part, favorable. 

"My 10yr daughter dreamt of the rupture [sic] recently,” one commenter wrote.

Another one posted, "Wow, I can read people and Joshua is 100% telling the truth.  I never even listen to videos claiming visions, but God told me to watch this."

Yet another commented, "Last month I also had a vision, I dreamt I was dreaming… and the Lord appeared, telling me He is coming soon."

Well, last night I dreamed that I looked out of my office window, and there were a bunch of pterodactyls roosting in the walnut trees in our front yard, and I was afraid to let my dogs out to pee because I didn't want the pterodactyls to attack them.  So I don't know that dreams are necessarily a good guide to reality.

Or at least mine aren't.

What comes to mind with all this is the biblical passage from the Gospel of Matthew chapter 24, wherein we read, "Then will appear the sign of the Son of Man in heaven.  And then all the peoples of the Earth will mourn when they see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory.  And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other...  But about that day or hour when all these things will happen no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father."

Note that the passage doesn't say, "... no one knows but only the Father and Pastor Joshua Mhlakela."

So I think we can all breathe a sigh of relief that Wednesday will dawn and we'll all still be here.  Of course, there is a downside to this, and that's... that we'll all still be here.  Because if you consider *gestures around vaguely at everything* the current situation down here on Earth is really fucking awful.  Maybe I should be rooting for Mhlakela, I dunno.

You know, I gotta wonder what sanctimonious hypocrites like Speaker of the House Mike Johnson would do if Jesus actually did come back.  "Yo, Mike," I can hear the Lord saying.  "What about that whole 'feed the hungry, clothe the naked, give the poor wanderer shelter' thing I commanded?  'Whatsoever you do to the least of these, you do unto me,' I believe were my exact words?  And there's also that thing about not bearing false witness."  *grabs him by the ear*  "Come with me, buddy, I think we need to have a 'little talk.'"

My guess is that for all of Johnson's pious praise-Jesus-ing, if that happened, he would piss his pants and then have a stroke.

So, yeah, at this point, bring on the Horsepersons.  I know as someone who's generally speaking an unbeliever, I'm kind of screwed either way, but at least watching the evangelicals scramble around trying to figure out how to account for their behavior over the last ten years would be entertaining as I'm waiting to be smited.

Smote?  Smitten?  Smoted?  Smoot?  Smot?  Smut?  I've never been entirely sure of what the correct participle is.

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Celestial whack-a-mole

If a large meteorite collided with the Earth, it would seriously ruin your day.

Depending on its size and where it hit, it could ruin your next several decades.  Even a relatively small impactor -- such as the Chelyabinsk meteorite of 2013, that exploded over the southern Urals in Russia in 2013 -- did some significant damage, (fortunately) mostly to buildings.  It is estimated to have been about nine thousand tonnes and eighteen meters in diameter, and when it hit the atmosphere and detonated from thermal shock, it released about thirty times the energy of the nuclear bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

And in the grand scheme of things, Chelyabinsk was nothing more than a pebble, of which there are likely to be millions out there in the Solar System, mostly (again, fortunately) not in orbits that threaten the Earth.  Bigger objects, such as the ten-kilometer Chicxulub meteorite that wrote finis to the Mesozoic Era, are fortunately far less common.

It's also a good thing that impacts have gotten less frequent over time.  The debris left over from the formation of the Solar System has gradually gotten swept up by the planets, either impacting them or being gravitationally flung out into space.  So comparatively speaking, we're safer now than we ever have been.  Four billion years ago, during the period called the Late Heavy Bombardment, there were so many impacts from asteroids and comets that the entire surface of the Earth re-liquified.  (One of the reasons that we have so few intact rocks left from the oldest periods of the planet's history.)

But just because in more recent geological history -- since, say, the beginning of the Cenozoic Era, 66 million years ago -- there have been fewer impacts, doesn't mean there have been none.  The reason the whole topic comes up is a study that came out this week in Nature Communications about the discovery of a three-kilometer wide crater, surrounded by concentric faults, caused by an meteorite impact 43 million years ago, that we hadn't even known about -- because it's underneath the North Sea.

Named the Silverpit Crater, it is thought to have been due to the collision of a 160-meter-diameter meteorite, traveling something like fifty kilometers per second.  The shock wave from the impact raised a tsunami estimated at a hundred meters high, that would have completely obliterated the coastlines of what is now England, Scandinavia, and the rest of northwestern Europe.

[Image credit: Uisdean Nicholson et al., Nature Communications, 20 September 2025]

While Silverpit didn't cause the global devastation that Chicxulub had, 23 million years earlier, it definitely would have caused problems, and not just for the region.  The impact would have blown tons of debris up into the atmosphere, dramatically lowering temperatures across the globe -- just as the eruption of Tambora did in 1815, causing the famous "Year Without a Summer."

If such an impact occurred today, it would have horrible consequences for the entire planet, likely including mass starvation because of widespread crop failure.

The question is what we could do to prevent such a catastrophe.  Even if we could detect an incoming meteor soon enough -- something iffier than ever, given Trump and his cronies' determination to completely sandbag NASA -- it's questionable that we'd have the lead time to try to deflect it into a safer path.  The DART Mission did exactly that, giving a nudge to the asteroid Dimorphos to change its orbit, so that was at least proof of concept -- but the DART lander itself took years to plan and build, and for something as small as the Silverpit impactor, it's unclear we'd know about it soon enough.

Other options -- like nuking the threatening meteor in space -- are dubious.  Even if you could blow up an asteroid, chances are all you'd accomplish is turn one incoming object into a hundred that were still on essentially the same trajectory.

So at present, I guess all we can do is hope for the best, and rely on the at least marginally-encouraging statistics that large meteor impacts are relatively uncommon.

Anyhow, that's our cheerful science news of the day.  The universe playing a game of celestial Whack-a-Mole with the Earth.  Me, I'm not going to worry about it.  On my list of Stuff I'm Experiencing Existential Dread About, this one ranks pretty low.  Certainly way behind climate change, various ongoing genocides, and the fact that my country's so-called leadership seems dead-set on turning the United States into Temu Nazi Germany.  Given all that, a meteorite collision might almost be an improvement.

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Mysterious mosaic

I've mentioned before how much I love a good mystery, and there's a hell of a good one underneath the town of Margate, Kent, England.

It's called the "Shell Grotto."  It consists of a set of steps, framed by an arch, leading down into a serpentine passageway through the chalk bedrock.  Then there's a room called the "Rotunda," with a circular arched dome over walls arranged in an equilateral triangle.  This leads into a winding underground tunnel about two and a half meters high by twenty-one meters long ending in a five-by-six meter rectangular space that's been nicknamed the "Altar Chamber."

The entire thing is lined by mosaics made out of seashells.

4.6 million of them.

Looking up into the Rotunda [Image is in the Public Domain]

The mosaic designs are constructed from the shells of mussels, cockles, whelks, limpets, scallops, and oysters, all relatively common in nearby bays.  They feature patterns appearing to be stylized suns and stars, floral motifs, and some purely geometric or abstract designs.

A detail from one of the mosaics [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Emőke Dénes, Shell Grotto, Margate, Kent 3 - 2011.09.17, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The Shell Grotto was discovered when the entrance was stumbled upon in 1835, and immediately became a sensation.  The West Kent Advertiser newspaper wrote the following in 1838 (which also should have taken first place in the Run-On-Sentence of the Year Contest):

Belle Vue cottage, a detached residence, has been lately been purchased by a gentleman, who, having occasion for some alterations, directed the workmen to excavate some few feet, during which operation the work was impeded a large stone, the gentleman being immediately called to the spot, directed a minute examination, which led to the discovery of an extensive grotto, completely studded with shells in curious devices, most elaborately worked up, extending an immense distance in serpentine walks, alcoves, and lanes, the whole forming one of the most curious and interesting sights that can possibly conceived, and must have been executed by torch light; we understand the proprietor intends shortly to open the whole for exhibition, at small charge for admission.

No one in the area had any memory of who had built it and why, so this opened up the floodgates for speculation.  Historian Algernon Robertson Goddard, writing in 1903, listed the possibilities as follows:

• a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century rich person's "folly"
• a prehistoric calendar
• a meeting place for "sea witches" (whoever those might be)
• something connected to the Knights Templar

This last one made me snort-laugh, because there's a general rule that if there's something mysterious and you want to make it more mysterious, throw in the Templars.  Umberto Eco riffed on this theme in his brilliant, labyrinthine novel Foucault's Pendulum, when he had his character Jacopo Belbo explaining to the main character (Casaubon) the difference between cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics:

A lunatic is easily recognized.  He is a moron who doesn't know the ropes.  The moron proves his thesis; he has a logic, however twisted it may be.  The lunatic, on the other hand, doesn't concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits.  For him, everything proves everything else.  The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy.  You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.

Be that as it may, we still don't know who built the Shell Grotto.  There are also extensive shell mosaics that were created by the Romans and the Phoenicians, but the archways in the Rotunda have impressed archaeologists as being more consistent with those used in twelfth-century Gothic cathedrals (although not nearly as large, obviously), and therefore not nearly old enough to be Roman or Phoenician in origin.  It seems like the simplest thing to do would be to carbon date one of the shell fragments -- mollusk shells are largely calcium carbonate, so it should be possible -- but the site is under private ownership, and to my knowledge no one has done that yet.

So the Shell Grotto remains mysterious.  It certainly represents an enormous amount of skill and dedication, whoever created it; just cutting a tunnel that long through chalk bedrock would take extensive and back-breaking labor, not to mention then hauling over four million shells there and somehow getting them to adhere to the walls in beautiful and flowing artistic patterns.  It's open for visits from the public, and next time I'm in England I'd love to check it out.  Just another reason to travel to a country I love -- as if I needed another one.

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The free speech you disagree with

Thomas Paine said, "He who would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself." 

This principle -- espoused by many leaders of the Enlightenment -- was famously summarized by historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall as "I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend unto death your right to say it."  It's a central founding tenet of democracy.  We all have voices, and are allowed (within certain well-demarcated boundaries, including prohibitions against threats, hate speech, and fraudulent claims) to use them to voice our own views.

That right has been steadily eroding under the Trump regime.

The situation got markedly worse following the assassination of right-wing agitator Charlie Kirk last week.  First, allow me to state up front that I am in no way celebrating Kirk's death.  No one deserves to be murdered, period, end of story.

But.  The fact remains that Kirk was a thoroughly horrible human being, and his violent death doesn't cleanse him of the odium of things he himself said.  Here's a small sampler:

• "[The biblical injunction to stone gay people to death] is God's perfect law when it comes to sexual matters."
• "[Black people] are coming out, and they're saying, 'I'm only here because of affirmative action.' Yeah, we know.  You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously.  You had to go steal a white person's slot to go be taken somewhat seriously."
• "We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the mid-1960s."
• "I can't stand the word empathy, actually.  I think empathy is a made up new age term that does a lot of damage."
• "[Transgender people] are an abomination to God."

But like -- we'd hope -- anyone else in the United States, Kirk had the right to say all those things, just as I have the right to vehemently, and vocally, disagree with them.

Then he was murdered.  And the people on the right immediately assumed that the killer was a leftist.  Or transgender.  Or an immigrant.  Or Black.  Or maybe a Black immigrant transgender leftist.  Before a scrap of information was known about the actual killer, self-proclaimed "free speech absolutist" (and, judging by the extent to which he controls content on X/Twitter, actual complete hypocrite) Elon Musk stated, "The Left is the party of murder."  I saw more than one person on social media post a horrified, "They killed Charlie Kirk" -- and you know who "they" is.  

Then a 22-year-old man was arrested for the murder, and it turns out he's a white Mormon conservative whose family his own grandmother described as "one hundred percent MAGA."  Well, can't have that spoiling the narrative -- so immediately the Right started casting about for reasons that the alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson, can't have been what he seemed.  A good example is this one, from Dinesh D'Souza Distort D'Newsa:

Never mind that Robinson attended college for exactly one semester, with the notoriously left-wing major of... engineering?  Not only that, it was during the COVID lockdown and contained only virtual classes, and he dropped out afterward -- to attend trade school.  

Man, those sly, scheming leftist professors work fast.

At present, the alleged killer's motives are unclear, as he's "not talking with investigators," but it's been credibly claimed that Robinson was a follower of people like Laura Loomer and Nick Fuentes, who criticized Kirk for not being far right enough.  (Interestingly, shortly after Kirk's death, Loomer deleted all her tweets that had been critical of Kirk, and Fuentes posted a message to his "Groyper Army" on X/Twitter, saying, "If you take up arms, I disavow you.  I disown you in the strongest possible terms."  More than a little suspicious, that.)

In all of this, what's certain is that Robinson is not anything close to a "leftist."

But none of that matters.  Trump has called for a crackdown on anyone vocally on the left, and especially anyone who is publicly critical of Charlie Kirk, often merely for repeating what Kirk himself said.  Just a couple of days ago, ABC terminated talk show host Jimmy Kimmel for saying, "The MAGA gang is desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it," which is nothing more than the honest truth.

And it's also true that currently the "MAGA gang" has a stranglehold on the media.  The United States is not as bad as North Korea yet -- where anything even remotely critical of Dear Leader can get you killed -- but it's rapidly heading that direction.  Forty percent of the news entering American households is controlled by stations owned by the strongly conservative-leaning Sinclair Broadcast Group, which includes the majority of not only Fox-affiliated stations but the majority of those connected to CBS, NBC, and ABC.  The idea of independent, unbiased news media in the United States is very much a thing of the past.  If you think they don't screen every last news story presented, and make sure anything even mildly critical of the current regime is expunged, you're fooling yourself.

The fact that people like Kimmel and Stephen Colbert got away with it for a while is actually surprising -- but now even they've been silenced.

I had virtually convinced myself not to write about Kirk's death and the fallout afterward.  Tempers are running high on both sides, and my own distaste for everything Kirk stood for makes it too easy for anyone who leans right to dismiss me as "just another radical leftist."  As I said in the beginning, no one deserves to be murdered for their beliefs, and that includes people I vehemently disagree with.  (And contrary to what a lot of MAGA types want you to believe, the vast majority of people on the left have been saying exactly that; the number of people I've seen "celebrating" Kirk's death is extremely small.)

But the idea that Trump and his cronies are coldly, callously using this violent act as an incentive for cracking down on dissent is somewhere beyond reprehensible.  It is also not without precedent.  The MAGA playbook owes much to the strategies of Joseph Goebbels, who used just such an incident -- the murder of Nazi party member Horst Wessel -- to crack down on the communists.  When Wessel was shot to death by a communist, he was elevated to martyr status, statues of him erected in public places, and a song about his heroism composed.  (In another parallel that would be comical if all this wasn't so deadly serious, Adolf Hitler didn't bother to go to Wessel's funeral, just as Trump didn't go to Kirk's -- Trump was too busy playing golf to honor the man he called "a true American hero.")

In any case, I decided I couldn't stay silent.  I'm not sure what this'll accomplish, besides probably losing me some followers.  At this point, there aren't many people who are still undecided, and the impossibly annoying backfire effect makes it likely that anyone who disagrees with me and reads this will come away disagreeing with me even more stridently.

But you know what?  That is your right.  I will keep speaking up, and I hope you do, too.  I can't do much to stop the degradation of human rights that is currently happening in this country, except for continuing to voice my beliefs as long as I am able.

The bottom line is that everyone supports the free speech they agree with.  The sticking point comes with supporting the free speech you disagree with.  And -- this is the critical thing -- screaming like hell when anyone tries to take away that right from anyone.  Because you know what?  Once the fascists start curtailing the rights to free speech, they don't stop.  You might want to reread Martin Niemöller's famous poem that begins "First they came for the socialists."  Yeah, perhaps right now you're safe, but if things keep going the way they're going, you can't count on staying that way.

Just remember -- that poem is all too short.  And it doesn't end well.

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Mechanical brain transplant

New from the "Well, I can't see any way that could go wrong, do you?" department, we have: scientists growing Neanderthal brain fragments in petri dishes and then connecting them to crab-like robots.

My first thought was, "Haven't you people ever watched a science fiction movie?"  This feeling may have been enhanced by the fact that just a couple of days ago I watched the Doctor Who episode "The End of the World," wherein the Doctor and his companion are damn near killed (along with everyone else on a space station) when a saboteur makes the shields malfunction using little scuttling metallic bugs.

The creator of the Neanderthal brain bits is Alysson Muotri, geneticist at the University of California - San Diego's School of Medicine.  He and his team isolated genes that belonged to our closest cousins, Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, and transferred them into stem cells.  Then, they allowed the cells to grow into proto-brains to see what sorts of connections would form.

Muotri says, "We're trying to recreate Neanderthal minds."  So far, they've noticed an abnormally low number of synapses (as compared to modern humans), and have speculated that this may indicate a lower capacity for sophisticated social behavior.

But Muotri and his team are going one step further.  They are taking proto-brains (he calls them "organoids") with no Neanderthal genes, and wiring them and his "neanderthalized" versions into robots, to make comparisons about how they learn.  Simon Fisher, a geneticist for the Department of Psycholinguistics at the Max Planck Institute, said, "It's kind of wild.  It's creative science."

That it is.

I have to admit there's a cool aspect to this.  I've always wondered about the Neanderthals.  During the peak of their population, they actually had a brain capacity larger than modern humans.  They clearly had culture -- they ceremonially buried their dead, probably had language (as they had the same variant of the "linguistic gene" FOXP2 that we do), and may have even made music, to judge by what appears to be a piece of a 43,000 bone flute that was found in Slovenia.

All that said, I'm not sure how smart it would be to stick a Neanderthal brain inside a metallic crab.  If this was a science fiction movie, the next thing that happened would be that Muotri would be in his lab late at night working with his Crab Cavemen, and he'd turn his back and they'd swarm him, and the next morning all that would be found is his skeleton, minus his femur, which would have been turned into a clarinet.

Okay, I know I'm probably overreacting here.  But it must be admitted that our track record of thinking through our decisions is not exactly unblemished.  Muotri assures us that these little "organoids" have no blood supply and therefore no potential for developing into an actual brain, but still.  I hope he knows what he's doing.  As for me, I'm going to go watch Doctor Who.

Let's see, what's the next episode?  "Dalek."  *reads description*  "A superpowerful mutant intelligence controlling a mechanical killing device goes on a rampage and attempts to destroy humanity."

Um, never mind.  *switches channel to Looney Tunes*

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Utopia for pirates

There are very few tropes that have had quite the cachet (and staying power) that pirates do.

Consider the popularity of the Pirates of the Caribbean series (what are we up to now, movie #5?  #8?  #12?  Who the hell can keep track?).  But it's been going on for a long while.  Treasure Island, for example, written by Robert Louis Stevenson in 1881, has seen several movie adaptations, of which this one is objectively the best:

The movie is brilliant from beginning to end, and if you can listen to the song "Cabin Fever" without guffawing, you're made of sterner stuff than I am.

In other iterations, the approaches vary from the comic (Our Flag Means Death) to the deadly serious (Blackbeard, Captain Blood), and I learned from Wikipedia that there have also been a few pornographic pirate movies, which I would prefer not to think about.  Even Lost in Space, never content to be left out, gave piracy their best shot with Cap'n Alonzo P. Tucker the Space Pirate, complete with (I shit you not) an electronic parrot:

In addition to the parrot, Tucker is identifiable as a pirate because he says "Arrrrh" and "Avast ye swabs" and "Ahoy matey" a lot.

So many legends have grown up around piracy that it's often hard to sort fact from fiction.  Sometimes it's easier to tell than others, though.  Disney, for example, seems to need a refresher on what the word "pirate" actually means:

As a biologist, though, I'm more puzzled by how the hell that parrot can fly, given that its head is bigger than the rest of its body put together.

The whole topic of pirates comes up because of a strange historical footnote I just recently learned about.  It has to do with a guy named James Misson, the ship La Victoire, and the country of Madagascar.

Misson, so the story goes, was Provençal, born somewhere in the southeast of France in around 1660 or so.  He started out as some sort of diplomat, and had been dispatched to Rome, but was "disgusted by the decadence of the Papal Court," and soured on the entire idea of autocratic government (very much in vogue at the time).  He fell under the influence of a "lewd priest" (which were also apparently common) named Caraccioli, who (along with Misson) signed on to the crew roster for a warship called La Victoire.  Why the crew needed a "lewd priest," I have no clue, but then, I have no idea what a bo's'un does, either, so maybe it's just one of those nautical things I never learned about.

In any case, Caraccioli had definite ideas about lots of things, and started having long discussions with Misson and the rest of the crew.  According to the 1724 book A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, Caraccioli "fell upon Government, and shew'd, that every Man was born free, and had as much Right to what would support him, as to the Air he respired... that the vast Difference betwixt Man and Man, the one wallowing in Luxury, and the other in the most pinching Necessity, was owing only to Avarice and Ambition on the one Hand, and a pusillanimous Subjection on the other."

Which I certainly can't find fault with.  Considering that at the moment, the top one percent of people, wealth-wise, own more than the rest of the world put together, I'd say we haven't progressed all that far in that regard.  Maybe we need more Notorious Pyrates to rough the place up, I dunno.

In any case, Misson took Caraccioli's sermons to heart, as did the rest of the crew, and they collectively decided to put Misson in charge and to embark on a career of piracy.  The General History doesn't say who the captain of La Victoire beforehand was, or what he had to say about this eventuality, but Misson took over anyhow to joyous shouts of acclaim from the crew, and they decided to found a piracy-based colony named Libertatia on the east coast of Madagascar.  The colony was intended to be a direct democracy run on socialist guidelines, where everything was shared and the people held the reins with regard to leadership, laws, and practices.

Hell, if Arthurian England could have an anarcho-syndicalist commune, why not a socialist pirate colony in seventeenth century Madagascar?

Well, there's only one sticking point to all of this, and you've probably already guessed it.

Libertatia, and James Misson, seem to be nothing more than a tall tale.

The first clue is that the only records of Misson are written at least forty years after his heyday, and in them he's variously called "Olivier" (not James) and "Mission" (not Misson).  But names were frequently messed about with back then, so that by itself isn't conclusive.  However, historians and archaeologists have tried like crazy to figure out where Libertatia was, and have found not a scrap of evidence that it ever existed.  There were several settlements made on Madagascar by pirates -- Abraham Samuel started one at Fort Dauphin, Adam Baldridge on the island of Ile Ste.-Marie, and James Plaintain at Ranter Bay, for example -- but all of these are reasonably well documented, and none of them match the details of James Misson and Libertatia from the General History.

This is unfortunate, because it makes a good story, doesn't it?  Good enough, in fact, that it's appeared in a number of works of fiction (notably two novels by William S. Burroughs), films, documentaries, and at least four different video games.  

So, like I said, it seems like a lot of us love a good pirate yarn.  A pity this one turns out to have been fashioned from whole cloth.  Like the strange story of Prester John, though, it seems like there being exactly zero evidence of its veracity hasn't slowed it down any.  And in this case, the mythical figure of James Misson is someone we can at least grudgingly admire -- little as we've followed his utopian vision of how society should run in the intervening three centuries.

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