The creative relationship

Ernest Hemingway famously said, "There isn’t any symbolism in The Old Man and the Sea.  The sea is the sea.  The old man is an old man.  The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish.  The shark are all sharks, no better and no worse.  All the symbolism that people say is shit.  What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know."

Thus frustrating the absolute hell out of literature teachers everywhere.

To me, though, the interesting point here isn't the bit about puncturing your tenth grade English teacher's balloon, it's the last part: "What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know."  Because that's true of all creative endeavors, isn't it?  When creativity succeeds, it's a dialogue, not a monologue.  We each bring to that dialogue our unique personalities and backgrounds and biases and individuality, and what we each take from it will be just as varied.

I ran into an interesting example of that last week when I was listening to the radio, and heard a song that was new to me -- Joywave's "Tongues."  I was immediately grabbed by the mesmerizing, electro-pop riff that introduces the song (and reappears several times during its run), but the lyrics were what fascinated me most.

They seem to exist at that strange intersection between "evocative" and "fever dream."  They're downright peculiar in places:

Pick me up, dust me off
Give me breath and let me cough
Drag me back, collect my thoughts
I've come back to the land I'd lost

The palms are down, I'm welcomed back to town
Sometimes I feel like they don't understand me
I hear their mouths making foreign sounds
Sometimes I think they're all just speaking in tongues

Despite their oddness, the lyrics immediately resonated with me.  Pretty much all my life, I've been baffled by the behavior of my fellow humans.  When I'm in conversations, even with people I know well and feel friendly toward, most of the time I not only never know what they're going to say next, I don't really get why they have the emotional reactions they do.  I often feel like I'm witnessing something I don't really understand on any deep level, and even afterward I can't really parse what happened and why.

I've described myself as feeling like a changeling -- someone who was replaced as a child by a being from another species, and has grown up irredeemably separate from the people around him.  And "Tongues" seemed to capture that sense of being a stranger in a strange land pitch-perfectly.

My emotional reaction was so powerful that I thought it'd be interesting to see what others came up with from listening to it.  The first place I went was the music video, which took an entirely different tack -- this one about how society makes us hide who we actually are.  [Nota bene: the video is cool but mildly NSFW, as it shows more human skin than might be appropriate in certain circumstances.  Be forewarned.]

Then I did a search to see if I could find out how the songwriters themselves described it, and I found a piece lead singer Daniel Armbruster did with Medium about the origins of the song.  Here's what Armbruster had to say:

There are a few things happening in the lyrics of “Tongues”, but a large chunk of it explores a disconnect with one’s peers.  Back when I was DJing in Rochester, I would see the same well-meaning individuals night after night talking about how they were moving to a bigger city, writing a novel, starting a band, etc, etc.  All of these things were great in theory, but no one ever did them.  They never left the bar so far as I could tell.  It really weighed on me after awhile and I’d just have to let it go in one ear and out the other.  In a way I felt like I needed to push myself harder to compensate for my peers’ lack of effort.  After the song came out, I had a person approach me one night in Rochester and tell me that the song had really resonated with them.  I was thrilled until they elaborated and said that they had been traveling on another continent recently and couldn’t understand the local dialect.  Hopefully that’s not what you take away from the song.

So there's yet a third and a fourth interpretation of what "Tongues" means.

As a writer, I share Armbruster's frustration that sometimes readers (or listeners) don't take away from a creative work what we intended.  But that's part of the game, isn't it?  Because creativity implies a relationship between producer and consumer, the producer can't (and shouldn't try to) control where it goes.  Readers, listeners, and observers are one-half of the creative relationship, and their uniqueness is inevitably going to shape what they pull out of the experience.  And, of course, this is why sometimes that relationship simply fails to form.  I love the music of Stravinsky, while it leaves my wife completely cold -- she thinks it's pointless cacophony.  A lot of people are moved to tears by Mozart, but I find much of his music inspires me to say nothing more than "it's nice, I guess."  My friend Andrew Butters, who is so much like me we've been described as sharing a brain, found my favorite book (Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum) a colossal bore, and forced himself to finish it only out a sense of loyalty.  Conversely, his favorite book, Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary, got no more than a tepid, "It wasn't a bad read" from me.

But that's what we should expect, you know?  How monotonous would the world be if we all had the same opinions about creative works? 

It's part of why I have zero patience for genre snobs and self-appointed tastemakers.  If some piece of creative work inspires you, or evokes emotions in you, it's done its job, and no one has the slightest right to tell you that you're wrong for feeling that way.  Honestly, I'm delighted if Mozart grabs you by the heart and swings you around; that's what music is supposed to do.  Just because I'm more likely to have that experience listening to Firebird than Eine Kleine Nachtmusik doesn't mean I'm right and you're wrong; all it means is that human creativity is complex, intricate, and endlessly intriguing.

So don't take it all that seriously if someone tells you what a poem, lyric, or piece of art or music means, even if that person is a college professor.  Enjoy what you enjoy, and bring your own creativity to the relationship.  It may be that Ernest Hemingway didn't mean The Old Man and the Sea to be anything more than a depiction of an incident involving a fisherman, a boy, a fish, and some sharks; but that doesn't mean you can't bring more to the reading, and pull more out of it, yourself.

And isn't that what makes the creative experience magical?

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Birdwalking into the Miocene

From the One Thing Leads To Another department, we have: a cute little fuzzy mammal from Madagascar, some thoughts about genetic drift, and a period of geological history during which a lot was happening.

I'd like to say that this kind of twisty mental path is infrequent for me, but unfortunately, it happens pretty much on a daily basis, and has since I was a kid.  When I was around twelve years old, my parents splurged on a set of Encyclopedia Brittanica, ostensibly to assist me with my schoolwork, but they (the Encyclopedia, not my parents) were honestly more of a hindrance than a help.  I'd go to the Brittanica to look up, say, something about the Monroe Doctrine for social studies class, and my mom would find me three hours later with fifteen open volumes spread on the floor around me, with me in the middle immersed in an article about venomous snakes in Malaysia.

It's why conversations with my older son, with whom I seem to share a brain, are like some kind of weird exercise in free association.  We've occasionally tried to reconstruct the pathway by which we got to a particular topic, and there's usually a logical connection between each step and the preceding one, but overall, our discussions give new meaning to the word labyrinthine.

Anyhow, today I started on this particular birdwalk when someone posted a photograph on social media of an animal I'd never heard of: the ring-tailed vontsira (Galidia elegans).  The vontsira is kind of adorable:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Charles J. Sharp creator QS:P170,Q54800218, Ring-tailed vontsira (Galidia elegans) 2, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The vontsira and its relative the falanouc are in the family Eupleridae along with a species I had heard of, the fossa, which is a sleek, elegant, weasel-like animal that is only distantly related to other members of the Order Carnivora.  All of the eupleurids live in Madagascar, and like most of the endemic species on the island, they're threatened by habitat loss and competition from non-native species.

What I found most curious about these mammals is that they're a clade -- genetic studies have found that eupleurids all descend from a single small population that arrived in Madagascar something like twenty million years ago, and then diversified into the species you see today.  Chances are, the ancestors of the vontsira, falanouc, fossa, and other eupleurids came over from Africa via rafting in the early Miocene Epoch.  They're distant cousins of the much more common and widespread mongooses, hyaenas, genets, and civets, and it was probably some prehistoric viverroid (the parvorder that includes all five groups) that made its way to Madagascar and gave rise to modern eupleurids.

This led me to looking into what was happening, geology-wise, during the Miocene.  I knew it was a busy time, but I didn't realize just how busy.  Tectonic movement closed off the Mediterranean Sea from the Indian Ocean, and then a shift at the western end of the Mediterranean closed off the Straits of Gibraltar; the result was that the Mediterranean dried up almost completely, something called the Messinian salinity crisis because what was left was a salty desert with an average temperature of something like 110 F and two disconnected lakes of concentrated brine.  At the end of the epoch, another plate movement reopened the Straits, and there was a flood of a magnitude that beggars belief; at its peak, the flow rate was enough to raise the level of the refilling Mediterranean by ten meters per day.

This is also the period during which the Indian subcontinent rammed into Asia, raising the Himalayas and introducing a bunch of African species into Asia (this is why there are lemurs in Madagascar and India, but none in the Middle East).  Also, it's when the Columbia River Flood Basalts formed -- an enormous (175,00 cubic kilometers) blob of igneous rock covering what is now eastern Washington and Oregon, and the west parts of Idaho -- an eruption probably due to the same hotspot which now underlies Yellowstone.

Because of all this, the climate during the Miocene might as well have been attached to a yo-yo.  Warm periods rapidly alternated with cold ones, and wet with dry.  As you might imagine, this played hell with species' ability to adapt, and groups came and went as the epoch passed -- the borophagine ("bone-crushing") canids, the terrifying "hypercarnivorous" hyaenodonts, and the enormous, superficially pig-like entelodonts amongst them.  The first apes evolved, and the split between the ancestors of modern humans and modern chimps occurred in the late Miocene, something like seven million years ago.

If all that wasn't enough, some time during the Miocene -- geologists are uncertain exactly when -- there was an asteroid impact in what is now Tajikistan, forming the twenty-five-kilometer-wide Karakul Crater Lake, which at an elevation of 3,960 meters is higher than the much better-known Lake Titicaca.

So there you have it.  A brief tour of the chaotic paths through my brain, starting with a furry woodland animal from Madagascar and ending with a meteorite impact in Tajikistan.  Hopefully you found some stops along the way interesting.  Now y'all'll have to excuse me, because I need to go look up a single fact in Wikipedia to answer a question a friend asked about linguistics.  You'll find me in a few hours reading about how general relativity applies to supermassive black holes.

I'm sure how I got there will make sense to me, at least.

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Encyclopedia Galactica

I was an undergraduate when the original Cosmos first aired.

It was back in 1980, and I still remember being blown away by it all -- the melding of science with animation and gorgeous music, and Carl Sagan's lyrical, almost poetic way of expressing his enduring love for astronomy.  My friends and I always waited excitedly for the next episode to air, and the day afterward spent an inordinate amount of time chatting about what we'd learned.

One of the episodes that resonated the most strongly with me was entitled "Encyclopedia Galactica."  Sagan predicted a day when we'd know so much about the universe that we'd have an encyclopedia of alien planets, each page of which would be accompanied by a list of their physical characteristics -- and types of life forms.  He was unequivocal in his belief that we were not alone in the universe, and that in fact life would turn out to be common.  Not, perhaps, "life as we know it, Jim" -- and much of it almost certainly pre-technological -- but life, he thought, would turn out to be pretty much everywhere we looked.

In the forty-five years since it aired, our detecting equipment has gotten better and better, but we're still up against the Fermi Paradox -- that famous quip from physicist Enrico Fermi who, when told that life was likely to be common in the universe, said, "Then where is everybody?"  Long-time readers of Skeptophilia may recall that a few years ago I did a deeper dive into the Fermi Paradox and the infamous "three f's," but the fact remains that despite getting better and better at astronomy and astrophysics, we still have no incontrovertible evidence of extraterrestrial life (intelligent or otherwise).

But extrasolar planets?  Those are kind of a dime a dozen.  As of this month, there have been a bit over six thousand exoplanets conclusively identified, and some of them have challenged our models of what planets can be.  (I took a look at a few of the weirder ones in a post earlier this year.)  So even if we don't yet have aliens in our back yard, there's been a lot of really cool information discovered -- three examples of which have just come out in the past couple of weeks.

No Andorians yet, more's the pity.

The first is about the TRAPPIST-1 system, which was one of the first multi-planet systems discovered.  Not only that, it has four planets in the "Goldilocks zone" -- the region around the host star that is "just right" for having temperatures where water could be in its liquid state.  (This doesn't mean there is water; just that if other factors were favorable, there could be liquid water.)  Not only that, but we lucked out that TRAPPIST-1 is fairly close (a little over forty light years away, in the constellation of Aquarius), and that its planets' orbits are aligned so that from our perspective, they cross in front of their host star, allowing astrophysicists to use the transits to take a stab at the composition of their atmospheres.

The outstanding YouTuber Dr. Becky Smethurst did a wonderful video explaining how this all works (and why the planet TRAPPIST-1d probably doesn't have an atmosphere), but a capsule summary is that when the planet passes in front of the star, its light passes through the planet's atmosphere (if it has one), and any gases present absorb and scatter characteristic frequencies of light.  Compared to the unobstructed spectrum of the star, those frequencies are then missing (or at least diminished in intensity), and from that information astrophysicists can deduce what might be present in the atmosphere.

Well, the other three planets in the habitable zone -- TRAPPIST-1b, c, and d -- have pretty conclusively been shown to lack an atmosphere.  So it all hinges on 1e, the farthest one out, and a study at the University of Bristol, using data from the James Webb Space Telescope, has said that it cannot rule out the presence of an atmosphere on that one.  Not a ringing endorsement, that, but at least not a categorical no -- so we'll keep our eyes on TRAPPIST-1e and hope future studies will give us good news.

The other two stories are about "rogue exoplanets" -- planets out there floating in space that don't (or at least, don't now) orbit a star.  Whether they formed that way, or started out in a stellar system and then were ejected gravitationally, is unknown (and may well be different in different cases).  These, for obvious reasons, are considered poor candidates for life, but they still are pretty amazing -- and the fact that we know about them at all is a tribute to our vastly improved ability to detect objects out there in interstellar space.

The first one, CHA-1107-7626, is currently accreting material like mad -- something not seen before in an exoplanet, rogue or otherwise.  It is estimated to be between five and ten times the mass of Jupiter, so on the verge of being a "brown dwarf" -- a superplanet that has sufficient mass and pressure to fuse deuterium but not hydrogen.  They emit more energy than they absorb, but don't quite have enough for the nuclear furnace to turn on in a big way.

But if CHA-1107-7626 keeps going the way its going, it may get there.  It's hoovering up an estimated Jupiter's worth of material every ten million years or so, which is the largest accretion rate of any planet-sized object ever observed.  So what we might be witnessing is the very earliest stages of the formation of a new star.

The final study is about the rogue exoplanet SIMP-0136, which came out of Trinity College Dublin and again uses data from JWST.  But this exoplanet is bizarre for two different reasons -- it has vast storms of what amounts to liquid droplets of sand... and it has auroras.

Once again, I'm staggered by the fact that we could detect this from so far away.  The temperature of the surface of the planet is around 1,500 C -- hotter than my kiln at full throttle -- and it has three hundred kilometer per hour winds that blow around bits of molten silica.  But most peculiar of all, the planet's atmosphere shows the characteristic polar light flashes we see down here as auroras.

What's weirdest about that is that -- at least on Earth -- auroras are caused by solar activity, and this planet isn't orbiting a star.  The way they form down here is that the solar wind ionizes gases in the upper atmosphere, and when those ions grab electrons, and the electrons descend back to the ground level, they emit characteristic frequencies of light (the same ones, not coincidentally, that are swiped by gases in the atmospheres of planets during transits).  Red for monoatomic oxygen, green for diatomic oxygen, blue for molecular nitrogen, and so on.

What is ionizing the gases on SIMP-0136?  Astrophysicists aren't sure.  Sandstorms here on Earth can certainly cause static electrical discharges (what we laypeople refer to as "bigass lightning bolts"), so it's possible we're seeing the light emitted from interactions between the molten silica and whatever gases make up the planet's atmosphere.  But it's too soon to be sure.

So even if we haven't yet discovered Skithra or Slitheen or Sontarans or whatnot, we're still adding some pretty amazing things to our Encyclopedia Galactica.  Carl Sagan, as usual, was prescient.  As he put it, "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."

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Color my world

When you think about it, color perception is really strange.

Just about all of us have wondered whether we all see colors the same way -- if, for example, what you see as blue is the same as what I see as yellow, but we both identify them using the same word because there's no way to know we're not seeing them the same way.  I've always thought that unlikely.  After all, with few exceptions (other than genetic or structural abnormalities, about which q. v.) our eyes and brain are all built on the same basic plan.  I guess it's possible that we each see the world's colors differently, but the most parsimonious explanation is that because the underlying structures are the same, we're all pretty much perceiving identical color palettes.

Of course, there's no way to know for certain, and I ran into two things just in the last couple of days that leave me wondering.

The first is a curious conversation I had with my friend, the awesome writer Andrew Butters, whose books -- especially the staggeringly good Known Order Girls -- should be on everyone's TBR list.  It started out with an amusing discussion of words that sound like they should mean something else.  One of Andrew's was ambulatory, which to him sounds like "someone who is so incapacitated they need an ambulance."  I personally believe that pulchritude should mean "something that makes you want to puke," and not what it actually does, which is "beauty."  And then Andrew mentioned that he always thought the color words vermilion and chartreuse were wrong, and in fact backwards -- that vermilion should mean a light green and chartreuse a bright orangey-red.

This struck me as really weird, because those two words have never given me that sense.  This may be because I've known them both since I was little.  I knew vermilion because I grew up a mile away from Vermilion Bayou, so named because the red mud of southern Louisiana stains the water reddish brown.  Chartreuse I knew because my grandma's employer, Father John Kemps, was an eccentric, bookish, cigar-smoking Dutch expat who was very fond of a post-meal tipple and loved chartreuse, the pale green herbal French liqueur from which the color got its name.

So I asked Andrew where his misapprehension came from.  He said he wasn't sure, but that perhaps the vermilion one came from the French vert (green); Andrew, like most Canadians, is English-French bilingual.  But where his thinking chartreuse should mean "red" came from, he had no idea.

What baffled me further, though, was when he pointed out that he's not alone in this.  There's a whole page on Reddit about thinking that vermilion and chartreuse are backwards, and an astonishing number of people chimed in to say, "Yeah, me too!"  So why those particular words, and not another pair?  Why not citron and azure, or something?

The second is that I'm finally getting around to reading Oliver Sacks's book An Anthropologist on Mars, which has to do with the intersection between neurological disorders and creativity.  The very first chapter is about a painter who was in a car accident that resulted in brain damage causing cerebral achromotopsia -- complete colorblindness due not to abnormalities in the cones of the retina, but because of damage to a region of the brain called the V4 prestriate cortex.  Afterward, he saw the world in shades of gray -- but with some distinct oddities, because pure white surfaces looked "dirty" or "smudged" to him, red looked black, and blue looked a pale gray.

This brought up an interesting discussion about how we see color in the first place, and that color perception (even within a single, normally-sighted individual) isn't absolute, but comparative; we assess the color value of a region by comparison to the entire visual field.  If the whole "what color is this dress?" thing that was going around a few years ago didn't convince you of that, try this one out:

Every one of these spheres is exactly the same color; they were, in fact, cut-and-pasted from a single image.  The only thing that differs is the color of the foreground stripes that cross each one.  But since your eyes judge color based on context, it's impossible to see them as the same even once you cognitively know what's going on.

Don't believe it?  If you go to the link provided, the article author (the wonderful Phil Plait) created an animation that cycles between the image with and without the stripes.  It's mind-blowing.

All of this circles around to the weird topic of synesthesia, which is a still-unexplained sensory phenomenon where people have a sort of cross-wiring between two senses.  Russian composer Alexander Scriabin was a synesthete, who experienced sensations of colors when he heard chords; C# minor, for example, looked a bright emerald green.  (If you want to find out more, the amazing book by Richard Cytowic, The Man Who Tasted Shapes, is still considered one of the seminal works on this odd disorder.)

I wonder if what Andrew (and the others with the vermilion-chartreuse switch) are experiencing is a form of synesthesia.  A former student of mine is a synesthete for whom printed letters (and whole words) evoke sensations of colors, so his word choices while writing took into account whether the colors were harmonious, not just that the words made semantic sense.  (I hasten to add that he was and is one of the most brilliant people I've ever known, so his synesthesia didn't cause his writing to lack any clarity to non-synesthetes like myself -- although it has been known to slow him down as he struggled to find words that satisfied both meaning and appearance.)  So perhaps the "vermilion = light green" thing comes from the fact that for Andrew and the others on the Reddit page, the word looks green irrespective of its association with an actual (different) color.

What I find odd still, though, is that so many people have those two particular color words backwards.  Synesthesia is remarkably individual; while one of its hallmarks is a complete consistency within a particular person (Scriabin always saw C# minor as green, for example), it varies greatly from person to person.  The fact that vermilion and chartreuse are reversed for so many people is just plain peculiar.

So there's still a lot we don't know about how exactly we perceive color, and maybe my "parsimonious" explanation that (other than those with colorblindness, synesthesia, and other visual disorders) we're all seeing colors more or less the same way fails to capture the complexity of the real world.  Wouldn't be the first time I've thought things were simpler than they turned out to be.  Maybe it's just my perception because I'm a non-synesthete with intact color vision.

But until we're somehow able to see things through someone else's eyes and brain, that's a limitation I can't escape except for in my imagination.

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Anomaly analysis

I try to be tolerant of people's foibles, but one thing that annoys the absolute hell out of me is when someone is obviously ignorant of the basic facts of a subject, and yet expects everyone to treat their opinion about it as if it had merit.

It's why "the Big Bang means nothing exploded and made everything" (cosmology) and "why are there still monkeys?" (evolutionary biology) both make me see red almost instantaneously.  Fer cryin' in the sink, if you're going to talk about something, at least take the five minutes it requires to read the fucking Wikipedia page on the topic first.  Yes, I suppose you're "entitled to your opinion" regardless, but I'm in no way required to treat such idiocy as if it were Stephen Hawking levels of brilliance.

I mean, I have a lot of faults, but one thing I try to avoid is pontificating on subjects about which I am ignorant.  I have a pretty good idea of the limits of my own knowledge, and I am unhesitating in saying, "Sorry, I don't know enough to comment about that."

It's really not that hard to say.  Try it, you'll see.

What brings this whole infuriating subject up is all the people who weighed in on something that is honestly a very cool piece of research, which came out in the journal Geophysical Research Letters last week.  A team led by geophysicist Charlotte Gaugné-Gouranton, of Paris City University, used satellite data to analyze a peculiar shift in the Earth's gravitational field that affected a huge region of the eastern Atlantic Ocean.

The team is uncertain what caused the anomaly, which lasted for about two years and then subsided back into its original state.  "By analyzing time series of GRACE [Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment]-derived gravity gradients, we have identified an anomalous large-scale gravity gradient signal in the eastern Atlantic Ocean, maximum at the beginning of 2007, which cannot be fully explained by surface water sources nor core fluid flows," the researchers wrote.  "This leads us to suggest that at least part of this signal could reflect rapid mass redistributions deep in the mantle."

The team suspects it might have been caused by a sudden phase transition in a common mantle mineral called bridgmanite (Mg,Fe(SiO3)), which could cause mass redistribution because of changes in density, similar to what happens when water freezes into ice.  But further research is needed to confirm this explanation.

Well, in a classic case of people adding 1 + 1 and getting 73.8, we immediately had dozens of self-styled experts adding "anomaly" to "gravity" and multiplying by "cannot be fully explained" and getting... well, take a look for yourself:

• "Advanced technology of alien manufacture is capable of 'shielding' from gravity and is the means of FTL propulsion that's been observed over and over.  This 'blink' means it's finally been captured by scientific equipment.  Countdown until the government denials start."
• "Disruptions like this are to be expected during the End Times.  Hell is on the move."
• "The scientists know more than they're letting on.  I wouldn't live along the East Coast of the United States if you paid me.  Connections to La Palma?"  [Nota bene: La Palma is one of the Canary Islands, home to a volcano that has been erupting intermittently since 2021, and was the subject of a rather hysterical BBC documentary in 2000 about how the island could split in half and cause a megatsunami -- something geologists have determined is extremely unlikely]
• "When those windows open and close again, it is a sign of the Celestial Ascension.  We should expect more of the same very soon."
• "I'm surprised they let this study get published.  Something that can change the Universal Law of Gravity, and they're shrugging it off as an 'anomaly'?  But now that the secret is out, why hasn't this been headline news worldwide?"
• "The LHC [Large Hadron Collider] went online in 2008.  Not a coincidence.  It's only a theory, but they said that the LHC could create mini black holes, and this may be proof."
• "Movement within the Hollow Earth.  But movement of what?  Stay tuned, folks, this is big."

*brief pause to stop banging my head against my desk while whimpering softly*

Okay, let's all just hang on a moment.  First of all, this anomaly was vast in size, but tiny in magnitude.  The fluctuation was small enough that it was undetectable on the Earth's surface (the scientists' own words) and was only caught by highly sensitive sensors on satellites that had been specifically designed to detect minute shifts in the Earth's gravitational field.  Second, it wasn't a "blink" -- it lasted for over two years.  Third, it peaked back in 2007, so whatever it was ended seventeen years ago, and in that time we have seen no Atlantic megatsunamis, aliens, Celestial Ascensions, or hellmouths opening.  Fourth, a shift in the gravitational field just means "something with mass moved," not a "change in the Universal Law of Gravitation."  Fifth, if the LHC had created a dangerous mini black hole, you'd think the physicists right there in Switzerland would have been the first to know, not some geologists working out in the Atlantic.  Sixth, you can't give an idea legitimacy simply by adding the phrase "it's only a theory;" if a claim was stupid before, it's still stupid after you say that.  In fact, it might be even stupider.

Seventh, and most importantly: for fuck's sake, people.

Captain Picard has absolutely had it with this kind of nonsense.

It's not that we laypeople -- and I very much include myself in that term -- can't get carried away by the hype sometimes.  In fact, when I first read about the La Palma thing a few years ago, I was honestly kind of freaked out by it; devastating landslide-induced megatsunamis have happened before (in fact, long-term followers of Skeptophilia might recall that I've written about two of them here -- the Storegga Slide and the Agadir Canyon Avalanche).  But then I did what everyone should do when they're confronted with a claim outside of their area of expertise; I did a little digging to find out what the scientists themselves had to say on the topic, and I found out that just about all geologists agree that while La Palma is clearly seismically active, it's unlikely to fracture and create an ocean-wide megatsunami.

At that point, I just kind of went, "whew," and resumed business as usual.  I did not then go on to claim that the scientists were wrong, the island was too going to fracture, and aliens from the Hollow Earth were going to use their anti-gravity faster-than-light propulsion to come out and usher in either the End Times or the Celestial Ascension, depending on which version you went for earlier.

Look, it's not that there's anything specifically dangerous about thinking there's an alien base under the eastern Atlantic.  It's more that such fuzzy irrationality very quickly becomes a habit.  Once you're accustomed to demanding respect for a claim that upon examination turns out to be "this crazy, fact-free idea I just now pulled out of my ass," you begin to apply the same demand for your uninformed opinions on medicine, the economy, and politics.

Which in one sentence explains why the United States is currently a slow-motion train wreck.

It all goes back to what Isaac Asimov said in 1980, doesn't it?  Seems like a good place to end:

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been.  The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

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The legend of the lost sister

The difficult thing about any sort of historical research is that sometimes, the evidence you're looking for doesn't even exist.

In my own field of historical linguistics, for example, we're trying to determine what languages are related to each other (creating, as it were, a family tree for languages), figuring out word roots, identifying words borrowed from other languages, and reconstructing the ancestral language -- based only on the languages we now have access to.  There are times when there simply isn't enough information available to solve the particular puzzle you're working on.

The further back in time you go, the shakier the ground gets.  You'll see in etymological dictionaries claims like "the Proto-Indo-European word for 'settlement' or 'town' was *-weyk," but that's an inference; there aren't many Proto-Indo-Europeans around these days to verify if this is correct.  It's not just a guess, though.  It was reconstructed from the suffixes -wich and -wick you see in a lot of English place names (Norwich, Warwick), the Latin word vicus (meaning "a village in a rural area"), the Welsh gwig and Cornish guic (which mean approximately the same as the Latin does), the Greek word οἶκος (house), the Sanskrit viś and Old Church Slavonic vĭsĭ (both meaning "settlement"), and so on.  Using patterns of sound change, we can take current languages (or at least ones we have written records for) and backpedal to make an inference about what the speakers of PIE four thousand years ago might have said.

Still, it is only an inference, and the inherent unverifiability of it sometimes leaves practitioners of "hard science" scoffing and quoting Wolfgang Pauli, that such claims "aren't even wrong."  I think that's unduly harsh (but of course, given that this is basically what my master's thesis was about, it's no surprise I get a little defensive).  Even so, I think we have to be careful how hard to push a claim based on slim evidence.

That was my immediate thought when I read an article by Jay Norris, of Western Sydney University, in The Conversation.  It was about the mythology associated with my favorite naked-eye astronomical feature -- the Pleiades.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rawastrodata, The Pleiades (M45), CC BY-SA 3.0]

Norris and another astronomer, Barnaby Norris (not sure if they're related, or if it's a coincidence), have authored a paper that appeared in a book in 2022 called Advancing Cultural Astronomy which looks at a strange thing: in cultures all over the world, the Pleiades are associated with a collection of seven individuals.  They're the Seven Sisters in Greece, and also in many indigenous Australian cultures, for example.  And Norris and Norris realized two things that were very odd; first, that even on a clear night, you can only see six stars with the naked eye, not seven; and in both the Greek and Australian myth, the story involves a "lost sister" -- one of the seven who, for some reason or another, disappeared or is hidden.

So they started looking in other traditions, and found that all over the world, in cultures as unrelated as Indonesian, many Native American groups, many African cultures, the Scandinavians, and the Celts, there was the same tradition of associating the Pleiades with the number seven, and with one of the group who was lost.

They then went to the astronomical data.  They found that the stars in the Pleiades are moving relative to each other, and that a hundred thousand years ago there would have been seven stars visible to the naked eye in the cluster, but in the interim two of them moved so close together (from our perspective, at least) that they appear to be a single star unless you have a telescope.  That, they say, is the "lost sister," and is why cultures all over the world have a tradition that the group used to have seven members, but now only has six.

And this, they said, was evidence that the myth of the Pleiades is one of the oldest stories humans have told.  At least fifty thousand years old -- when the indigenous Australians migrated across a grassy valley that (when the sea level rose) became the Bay of Carpentaria -- and perhaps as much as a hundred thousand years old, when the common ancestors of all humans were still living in Africa and (presumably) shared a single cultural tradition.

It's a fascinating claim.  I have to admit that the commonalities of the myths surrounding the Pleiades in cultures all over the world are a little hard to explain otherwise.  Still, I can't say I'm a hundred percent sold.  I know from my work in reconstructive linguistics that chance similarities are weirdly common, and can lead to some seriously specious conclusions.  (Long-time readers of Skeptophilia might recall my rather brutal takedown a few years ago of a guy named L. M. Leteane, who used cherry-picked chance similarities between words to support his loony claim that the Pascuanese -- or Easter Islanders -- were originally from Egypt, as were the Olmecs of Central America, and both languages were descended from Bantu.)

So as far as the claim that the story of the Seven Sisters is over fifty thousand years old, count me as interested but unconvinced.  I think it's possible; it's certainly intriguing.  But to me, it's too hard to eliminate the simpler possibility, that the "loss" of one of the stars in the Pleiades was noted by many ancient cultures -- separately, and much more recently -- and became incorporated into their legends, rather than all the legends of the Pleiades and the lost sister coming from a single, very ancient ancestral story.

But it'll give you something to think about, when you see the Pleiades on the next clear night.  Whatever the origins of the myths surrounding it, it's awe-inspiring to think about our distant ancestors looking up at the same beautiful cluster of stars on a chilly, clear winter's night, and wondering what it really was -- same as we're doing today using the tools of science.

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Jumping on the bandwagon

There's a peculiar twist on confirmation bias -- which is the tendency to accept without question poor or faulty evidence in favor of a claim we already believed in -- that is just as insidious.  I call it the bandwagon effect.  The gist is that once a sensational or outlandish claim has been made, there'll be a veritable tsunami of people offering up their own version of "yeah, I saw it, too!", often supported by factual evidence that (to borrow a line from the inimitable Dorothy Parker) "to call it wafer-thin is a grievous insult to wafer-makers."

The best example of this I've ever seen is the "Rendlesham Forest Incident," which has sometimes been called "Britain's Roswell."  It occurred in December of 1980 in a forested area between Woodbridge and Orford, Suffolk, England, and UFO aficionados are still discussing it lo unto this very day.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Simon Leatherdale, Supposed UFO landing site - Rendlesham Forest - geograph.org.uk - 263104, CC BY-SA 2.0]

Here are the facts of the case.

On 26 December 1980, U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt, working as part of an American unit stationed at the Royal Air Force Base at Woodbridge, saw lights descending into Rendlesham Forest.  He took some of his men to investigate the site where it appeared to land, and upon arrival saw "a glowing orb that was metallic in appearance with colored lights" that moved through the trees as they approached it.  Simultaneously, some animals on a nearby farm "went into a frenzy."  One of the servicemen who was with Halt called it "a craft of unknown origin."

Police were called in at around four A.M., and they found some burned and broken tree branches, and three small indentations in approximately an equilateral triangle.  They also found an increased radiation level, on the order of 0.03 milliroentgen per hour (for reference, that's a little more than the total from a typical dental x-ray, spread over an hour's time).

Halt revisited the site in the early hours of 28 December, and reported that he'd seen three point sources of light, two to the south and one to the north, that hovered about ten degrees above the horizon.  The brightest of these, he said, "beamed down a stream of light from time to time."

The incident was reported in the news -- and then the bandwagon effect kicked in.

There were several reports of domestic animals acting oddly, and one witness said he heard "a sound like a woman screaming."  Multiple people reported that they, too, had seen lights in the sky that night, and one person said what he'd seen "was so bright it could have been a lighthouse."  The USAF and RAF people at Woodbridge had their hands full over the next few weeks trying to figure out which of these accounts were true (if, perhaps, misinterpreted) and which were made up by folks who were simply trying to get in on the fun.

In the end, there was no further evidence uncovered.  So for something touted as "Britain's Roswell," we're left with... not much.

But what about Halt's testimony?

It seems likely that Halt himself was caught up on the bandwagon.  He did undoubtedly see something -- probably a meteor -- and after that, each subsequent piece of "evidence" simply added to his conviction that he'd witnessed something otherworldly.  The colored lights Halt and his men saw were probably the flashing warning lights of a distant police car; in fact, a U.S. security policeman working at Woodbridge, Kevin Conde, later confessed that he'd contributed his own bit to the confusion by driving through the forest in a police vehicle with modified lights. The indentations in the ground were found to be scrapes dug by rabbits.  The agitated domestic animals were simply because that happens when you have a lot of frightened people running around through farm pastures at night with flashlights.  The "hovering point sources of light" Halt saw when he revisited the site were almost certainly stars; the position of the brightest one he reported, in fact, corresponds to the location of Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky.

As far as the flashing light "so bright it could have been a lighthouse" -- that's because it was a lighthouse.  Specifically Orfordness Lighthouse, which is only about eight kilometers away and is easily visible from any high ground in the forest.

Brian Dunning, writing about the incident in Skeptoid in 2009, states:

Colonel Halt's thoroughness was commendable, but even he can be mistaken.  Without exception, everything he reported on his audiotape and in his written memo has a perfectly rational and unremarkable explanation...  All that remains is the tale that the men were debriefed and ordered never to mention the event, and warned that "bullets are cheap."  Well, as we've seen on television, the men all talk quite freely about it, and even Colonel Halt says that to this day nobody has ever debriefed him.  So this appears to be just another dramatic invention for television, perhaps from one of the men who have expanded their stories over the years.  When you examine each piece of evidence separately on its own merit, you avoid the trap of pattern matching and finding correlations where none exist.  The meteors had nothing to do with the lighthouse or the rabbit diggings, but when you hear all three stories told together, it's easy to conclude (as did the airmen) that the light overhead became an alien spacecraft in the forest.  Always remember: Separate pieces of poor evidence don't aggregate together into a single piece of good evidence.

Which is it exactly.  But unfortunately, human nature is such that once the ball starts rolling, it's hard to stop -- and there are all too many people who are eager to contribute their own little push to keep it accelerating.

As I've said many times before, no one would be happier than me if we got unequivocal evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life, at least until one of them decides to vaporize me with their laser pistol.  But unfortunately, Rendlesham just isn't doing it for me.  I tend to be very much in Neil deGrasse Tyson's camp when he says that as good skeptics, we need something more than "you saw it."  "Next time you're abducted," he said, "grab something from the spaceship and bring it back.  Then we can talk.  Because anything of extraterrestrial manufacture, that has crossed interstellar space, is gonna be interesting."

But until then, we'll just have to keep waiting.  And always, guard as well as we can against the inevitable biases that all humans are prone to.  Because sometimes -- unfortunately -- a lighthouse is just a lighthouse.

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