The puppetmasters

Well, Tuesday came and went, and no one got Raptured.

Not that I was expecting to go myself.  If anything, it was more likely the ground would open up and swallow me, kind of like what happened in Numbers chapter 16, wherein three guys named Korah, Dathan, and Abiram told Moses they were sick and tired of wandering around in the desert, and where was the Land of Milk and Honey they'd been promised, and anyway, who the hell put Moses in charge?  So there was an earthquake or something and the ground swallowed up not only the three loudmouthed dudes but their wives and kids and friends and domestic animals, which seems like overkill.  Literally.  Not surprising, really, because the God of the Old Testament was pretty free with the "Smite" function.  By one estimate I saw, according to the Bible God killed over two million people to Satan's ten, so I'm thinking maybe we got the whole good vs. evil thing backwards.

In any case, even that didn't happen on Tuesday, because here I am, unswallowed, as well as my wife and three dogs.  I haven't heard from my sons in a couple of days, but I'm assuming they're okay, too.  So all in all, it was an uneventful Tuesday.

The batting-zero stats of Rapture predictions from the past didn't stop people from completely falling for it yet again.  One woman sold all her belongings because she was convinced she wouldn't need them any more.  Another gave away her house -- like, signed over the deed and everything -- and at the time of the article (immediately pre-Rapture) was looking for someone to give her car to.  Another one donated her life savings, quit her job, and confessed to her husband that she was having an affair with a member of her church so she could "get right with God" before the Rapture happened -- and now is devastated because she's broke, jobless, and her husband is divorcing her.

It's hard to work up a lot of sympathy for these people, but at the same time, I have to place some of the blame on the people who brainwashed them.  No one gets to this advanced stage of gullibility unaided, you know?  Somewhere along the line, they were convinced to cede their own understanding to others -- and after that happens, you are putty in the hands of the delusional, power-hungry, and unscrupulous.

Which brings us to Peter Thiel.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Peter Thiel by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0]

You probably know that Thiel is a wildly rich venture capitalist, the founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and was the first outside investor in Facebook.  His current net worth is over twenty billion dollars, but the current wealth inequity in the world is such that even so, he's still not in the top one hundred richest people.  But the fact remains that he's crazy wealthy, and has used that wealth to influence politics.

It will come as no shock that he's a big supporter of Donald Trump.  But what you might not know is that he is also a religious loony.

I'm not saying that just because Thiel is religious and I'm not.  I have lots of friends who belong to religions of various sorts, and we by and large respect each other and each other's beliefs.  Thiel, on the other hand, is in a different category altogether.  To give one example, just last week he gave a talk as part of his "ACTS 17 Collective" ("ACTS" stands for "Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society"), wherein he said that we can't regulate AI development and use because that's what Satan wants us to do -- "the Devil promises peace and safety by strangling technological progress with regulation."  Limiting AI, Thiel said, would "hasten the coming of the Antichrist."

Oh, and he's also said that environmental activist Greta Thunberg is the Antichrist.  Which is a little odd, because as far as I can tell she's already here, and has been for a while, and thus far hasn't done anything particularly Antichrist-ish.  But maybe there's some apocalyptic logic here that I'm not seeing.

Thiel is absolutely obsessed with one passage from the Bible, from 2 Thessalonians chapter 2:

Don’t let anyone deceive you in any way, for that day will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the man doomed to destruction.  He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.

Don’t you remember that when I was with you I used to tell you these things?  And now you know what is holding him back, so that he may be revealed at the proper time.  For the secret power of lawlessness is already at work; but the one who now holds it back will continue to do so till he is taken out of the way.  And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the splendor of his coming.  The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with how Satan works.  He will use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie, and all the ways that wickedness deceives those who are perishing.  They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved.  For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness.

So what is that mysterious force that "holds back" the evil one, what St. Paul called the "κατέχων"?

Well, Thiel is, of course.  He and the techo-nirvana he is trying to create.  "[When the] Antichrist system collapses into Armageddon," religious commentator Michael Christensen writes, "only the few survive.  A techno-libertarian, [Thiel] entertains a kind of secular rapture: off-grid bunkers, floating cities or even planetary colonies.  In his apocalyptic vision, these survivalist escape hatches offer a way out of both collapse and tyranny—but only for the wealthy and well-prepared."

What's kind of terrifying about all this is how influential people like Thiel are.  His ACTS 17 Collective gatherings play to sold-out audiences.  His message, and that of others like him, then filters down to people like Pastor Joshua Mhlakela (the one who got the whole Rapture-Is-On-Tuesday thing started), and they then pass along their "repent or else!" fear-mongering to their followers.  It's why my lack of sympathy for the folks who bankrupted themselves because they figured they'd be Sitting At The Feet Of Jesus by Wednesday morning is tempered by, "... but was it really their fault?"  Sure, they should have learned some critical thinking skills, and been taught to sift fact from fiction.

But they weren't, for whatever reason.  And afterward, they were immersed in scary apocalyptic terror-talk day in, day out.  Who can blame them for eventually swallowing it whole?

It's easy for me, outside the system, to say the people who fell for Mhlakela's nonsense are just a bunch of fools.  But the truth is more nuanced than that, and a hell of a lot scarier.  Because brainwashing doesn't happen in a vacuum.

The puppetmasters behind it are almost always the powerful and rich -- who all too often not only get away with it, but profit mightily from it.  A terrified, brainwashed populace is easier to manipulate and extort.

Which exactly where people like Peter Thiel want us.

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The constancy of constants

One of the most enduring mysteries of physics is why the fundamental constants have the values they do.

I remember first thinking about this when I was a freshman in college, and we were looking at the Special Theory of Relativity in my intro-to-physics class.  The speed of light in a vacuum -- the ultimate speed limit, whatever Star Trek would have you believe -- is 299,792,458 meters per second.

What occurred to me was why it was exactly that number and not something else.  What if the speed of light was, say, twenty miles per hour?  Automobile travel would be a different game, and we'd have serious relativistic effects even riding a bicycle.  (Races would be an interesting affair; faster runners' clocks would move more slowly than slower runners' would, so by the end of the race, it'd be hard to get anyone to agree on what everyone's time was.)

All of which was delightfully silly stuff but didn't really get at the original question, which is why the speed of light has the value it does.  And it's not just the speed of light; in Martin Rees's wonderful book Just Six Numbers, he looks at how a handful of fundamental constants -- the gravitational flatness of the universe, the strength of the strong nuclear force, the ratio between the strength of the electromagnetic force and the gravitational force, the number of spatial dimensions, the ratio between the rest mass energy of matter and the gravitational field energy, and the cosmological constant -- have combined to produce the universe around us.  Alter any of these, even by a little bit, and you have a universe that would be profoundly hostile to life, if not to stable matter in general.

This has led some of the more religious-minded folks to what is called the Strong Anthropic Principle, sometimes called the "fine-tuning argument" -- that the universe has been fine-tuned for life, presumably by a Higher Power tweaking the dials on those constants to make them juuuuuuust right for us.  Which runs into two unfortunate counterarguments: (1) the vast majority of the universe is completely hostile to life regardless, including much of our home planet; and (2) the fact that we live in a universe where the important constants have those particular values isn't that surprising, because if they didn't, we wouldn't be around to remark upon it.

The latter is something known as the Weak Anthropic Principle, a stance that doesn't tell you much except for the unremarkable fact that the only kind of universe we could live in is one that has the conditions in which we could live.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

What I find intriguing is that none of these universal constants is derivable -- none come out of calculations based upon known physical laws... yet.  It might be that some of them are derivable and we just haven't figured out how.  Thus far, though, they seem completely arbitrary (except, as noted, that they have to have the values that they do in order for us to be here to consider the question).

A subtler question, and one that (unlike the fine-tuning argument) is actually testable, is whether those constants are the same everywhere in the universe, and whether they're constant over time.  Because if not -- if they vary either in time or space -- that strongly implies that they're not arbitrary, but derive from some underlying characteristic of matter, energy, and space/time that we have yet to uncover, and therefore in altered conditions could have a different value.  So a lot of time is being spent to determine whether any of these constants might be not so constant after all.

We at least have results for one of them, one that is not on Rees's List of Six but is nonetheless pretty damn important; the fine-structure constant, usually written as the Greek letter alpha.  The fine-structure constant is a measure of the strength of interaction between electrons and photons, and is equal to 1/137 (it's a dimensionless number, so it doesn't matter what units you use).

The fine-structure constant is one of the numbers whose value is instrumental in the formation of atoms, so (like Rees's numbers) if it were much different, the universe would be a very different place.  It's one that can be studied at a distance, because one outcome of the fine-structure constant having the value it does is that it creates the spread between the spectral lines of hydrogen.

So a team of physicists looked at the spectrum of hydrogen emitted in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole -- a place where the fabric of space/time is highly contorted because of the enormous gravitational field.  In a paper in Physical Review Letters, we find out that the fine-structure constant in that extremely different and hostile region of space is...

... 1/137.

The authors write:

Searching for space-time variations of the constants of Nature is a promising way to search for new physics beyond General Relativity and the standard model motivated by unification theories and models of dark matter and dark energy.  We propose a new way to search for a variation of the fine-structure constant using measurements of late-type evolved giant stars from the S-star cluster orbiting the supermassive black hole in our Galactic Center.  A measurement of the difference between distinct absorption lines (with different sensitivity to the fine structure constant) from a star leads to a direct estimate of a variation of the fine structure constant between the star’s location and Earth.  Using spectroscopic measurements of 5 stars, we obtain a constraint on the relative variation of the fine structure constant below 10^−5.

So the variation between the fine-structure constant and the fine-structure constant near a humongous black hole is less than a factor of 0.00001.

Note that this still doesn't tell us anything about why the fundamental constants have the values they do, all it does is suggest pretty strongly that they are constant regardless of the conditions pertaining in the region of space where they're measured.  So I guess we're still in the same boat as physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who said, "When I die, the first question I'm going to ask the Devil is, 'What is the meaning of the fine-structure constant?'"

The universe is a strange and mysterious place, and we're only beginning to figure out how it all works.  I mean, think about it; while I don't want to denigrate the scientific accomplishments of our forebears, we've really only begun to parse how the fundamental laws of nature work in the last 150 years.  It's an exciting time -- even if we don't yet have answers to a lot of the most basic questions in physics, at least we're figuring out which questions to ask.

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Jenny's ancestry

I went into historical linguistics because of my fascination with origins.

It's manifested in other realms of study.  My primary interest in biology, a subject I taught for over three decades, is evolutionary genetics; I'm endlessly interested in the family tree of life, and its connections to species migration, adaptation, paleontology, and extinction.  More personally, I've been a devoted genealogist since I was a teenager, and although my hoped-for noble lineage never showed up (my ancestry is virtually all French, Scottish, and English peasants, rogues, ne'er-do-wells, and petty criminals), I still periodically add to my database of ancestors and cousins of varying degrees, which now contains over 150,000 names.

It's why when I find a curious origin story, it just makes my little nerdy heart happy.  Like when I discovered something strange about a rather terrifying legend from northern England -- the tale of Jenny Greenteeth.

Jenny Greenteeth is a story that seems to be most common in Lancashire, Cumbria, and the western parts of Yorkshire, and is about a "river hag" -- a female water spirit that specializes in grabbing people, especially children, who have strayed too close to the water, and drowning them.  She shares a lot in common with the Slavic Rusalka and French Melusine, which makes me wonder why people kept dreaming up stories about strange women lying in ponds.  (Certainly it's no basis for a system of government.)

Well, like just about everything, the legend of Jenny Greenteeth didn't come out of nowhere; even folk tales have their origin stories.  (I've written here about the absolutely charming piece of research by anthropologist Jamshid Tehrani, wherein he developed a cladistic tree for the various versions of "Little Red Riding Hood.")  And Jenny Greenteeth has a bit of a surprise in store, because her name isn't because her teeth, or anything else about her, are green.

The hint comes from the fact that in some areas of Cumbria, she's still called "Ginny Grendith" -- and the last bit has nothing to do with teeth, either.  That the story evolved that way is like a folkloric version of convergent evolution; once people noticed the chance similarity between her original name and "green teeth," her last name morphed in that direction, probably because it gave her alleged appearance an extra little frisson of nastiness.  

So where does "Greenteeth" come from?  It turns out the name -- and its alternative form, Grendith -- are cousins to that of another creature from the English bestiary, the grindylow.  Like Jenny, the grindylow was a water-dweller, a small humanoid with scaly skin, big nasty pointy teeth, and long arms ending in broad hands with grasping fingers.  They, too, were said to be fond of drowning children.

It's a wonder any surviving kids in northern England who lived near water didn't become permanently phobic.

What's fascinating, though, is that the story doesn't stop there, because grindylow itself has even deeper roots.  The name is thought to have evolved from yet another mythological monster, this one much more famous: Grendel.

Grendel by J. R. Skelton (1908) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Grendel, of course, was the Big Bad in the pre-Norman English epic Beowulf, who was eventually killed by the titular hero.  In a translation by none other than J. R. R. Tolkien, Grendel is described as follows:

... the other, miscreated thing,
in man's form trod the ways of exile,
albeit he was greater than any other human thing.
Him in days of old the dwellers on earth named Grendel.

Grendel was called a sceadugenga -- a "shadow walker," a creature who came out at night.  He was a denizen of boundaries, not quite human and not quite beast, and frequented places that also were on the edge; the spaces between inhabited areas and the wilds, between lowlands and highlands... and between land and water.  He was said to be a "swamp-dweller," living in fens, and that may have been how his later descendants, the grindylow and Jenny Greenteeth, became associated with ponds and marshes.

I've always felt sorry for Grendel.  He did some bad stuff, but he was kind of just built that way.  He didn't ask to be put together from spare parts.  It's why I named a dog I had a while back Grendel.  He was a bit funny-looking too, but he always meant well.

Maybe it's just that I always root for the underdog.

Where the name Grendel came from isn't certain.  Some linguists believe it comes from gren ("grin") + dæle ("divided"), i.e. baring his teeth.  Old English gryndal meant "fierce," but whether that came from the name Grendel or the other way 'round is unknown.  Same thing for the Old Norse grindill, meaning "storm wind."  The Beowulf story has its roots in old Germanic mythology, and there's no doubt it has ties to Scandinavia, but that one may be an accidental false cognate.  Grendel could also come from the Old English grenedæl, "green lowland" -- so there might be a connection to the color green, after all.

In any case, it's an interesting, if unsettling, legend, which a curious history.  I have a pond in my back yard in which I regularly swim, and thus far I haven't been grabbed by a creepy woman with green teeth.  I'll keep my eye out, though.  You can't be too careful about these sorts of things.

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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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