The ghost forests

I recently read paleontologist Riley Black's lovely book When the Earth Was Green: Plants, Animals, and Evolution's Greatest Romance, which looks at the prehistory of life on Earth through the lens of paleobotany.

While I know the charismatic megafauna like dinosaurs and saber-toothed tigers and giant ground sloths garner most of the attention, I've always found ancient plants equally interesting.  Part of that comes from my ongoing love of both gardening and wild plants, something I've experienced since I was about six and discovered F. Schuyler Mathews's Field Book of American Trees and Shrubs, with its hundreds of pages of descriptions and range maps and wonderful illustrations.  I can't even begin to estimate the amount of time I spent poring over its pages (and I still own my copy of it).

Once I gained a passing knowledge of the trees and shrubs and wildflowers I saw every day, I was shocked to find out that if I were to go back a few million years, I'd find an entirely different assemblage of plant species.  I know, it shouldn't have been a surprise; if the animals had changed, there's no reason the plants wouldn't have as well.  But I still found it astonishing when I found out that (for example) at the moment, there is exactly one extant species of ginkgo (the familiar, and beautiful, Ginkgo biloba), but in the past there had been hundreds, perhaps thousands, of species in the family:

A sampler of now-extinct Jurassic ginkgo species [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Peter R. Crane, Pollyanna von Knorring, Fossil Ginkgoales, CC BY 4.0]

Riley Black does a masterful job of tracing the evolutionary history of plants from their origins to recent times, and her signature lucid writing style makes the subject completely captivating.  One of the chapters deals with an odd period of Earth's history -- the Cretaceous Resinous Interval, a span of about fifty million years during which there was intense diversification amongst gymnosperms, a group that includes not only ginkgos, but the superficially palm-like cycads and the much more familiar conifers.

Anyone who has ever leaned up against a pine or spruce tree knows about their impossibly sticky, golden-brown, aromatic sap.  This glop, so unfortunate for skin and clothing, evolved as a way of sealing wounds and preventing insect damage.  So in a relatively short time, we see the evolution of hundreds of species of plants that produced the stuff -- and, when it met the right conditions, hardening into amber.

Most of the world's amber, whether from Burma or the Baltic region or the highlands of Ecuador and Peru, formed during this time.  Amber has been popular for jewelry-making since the time of the ancient Greeks, and probably before; in fact, an interesting linguistic side-note is that the Greek name for amber, ἤλεκτρον, is where our words electron and electricity come from (due to amber's property of gaining a static charge when rubbed with a silk cloth).  But amber really came into the popular consciousness because of Jurassic Park, wherein some scientists extract dinosaur blood from bloodsucking insects trapped in amber, and use it to clone dinosaurs, with predictable results.

[Nota bene: it's thought that the upper bound for the survival of DNA in amber, even with optimal conditions, is around a million years, not the hundreds of millions required by Jurassic Park.  And even that is likely to be an overestimate.  In 2013, scientists tried -- and failed -- to extract intact DNA from a bee trapped in ten thousand year old copal, an amber precursor.]

That doesn't mean it can't have phenomenal paleontological significance, however, even if we're unlikely to have velociraptors stalking us any time soon.  The reason the topic comes up is a paper that appeared last week in Communications Earth about 112-million-year-old amber unearthed in an Ecuadorean quarry, which contained so many inclusions of insects, pollen, and seeds that it's being called a "Cretaceous time capsule."

A midge from the Ecuadorean amber.  Check out how well preserved those compound eyes and antennae are!  [Image credit: Mónica Solórzano-Kraemer]

The number of insect and arachnid taxa represented, as well as the pollen and other plant fossils discovered, paint a remarkably detailed picture of the ecosystem back then.  The authors write:

The new palaeobotanical evidence suggests the presence of a diverse and humid, low-latitude forest in north-western Gondwana during the early Albian...  The strata in this quarry reveal a vertical evolution of various palaeoenvironments, including proximal braided rivers, lacustrine systems, hyperpycnal [high-density, high-sediment] flows, and distal braided rivers during the Albian...  Pollen and plant macrofossils show abundant ferns and fern-allies that likely grew in the understory and/or near water bodies, in a forest dominated by araucariacean resinous trees.  The overall palynological and plant macrofossil association found in the Genoveva quarry, particularly the high diversity of pteridophytes and the presence of moderately thick coal seams in the stratigraphic sequence, indicates a humid environment, similar to previous reports in other but less studied north-western tropical South American sites.

The presence of relatively abundant chironomid flies and one trichopteran as bioinclusions—both insect groups with aquatic larval stages—further supports the interpretation of predominantly humid conditions during resin production and deposition.

Fascinating to think that if you went back there, in that thriving humid lowland forest, you wouldn't see a single modern plant species.  Not one.  Groups, sure -- we still have araucariacean trees around today (the most familiar being the Norfolk Island pine and the monkey-puzzle tree) -- but our modern forests, even in habitats with similar climates, have no species in common with those that produced the 112-million-year-old Genoveva amber. 

Change is always the way of things, but still, it strikes me as sad that all those many forms most beautiful and most wonderful (to swipe Darwin's pithy phrase) are gone.  Last week at the Tompkins County Friends of the Library Used Book Sale -- a twice-a-year, three week long, must-attend event for any bibliophiles within driving distance of Ithaca, New York, and which offers a quarter of a million used books each go round -- I picked up a real prize in a lovely illustrated paleobotany text, with drawings and fossil photographs representing over a thousand different species of plants no longer to be found anywhere on Earth.

I think this morning I'll spend some time flipping through its pages, and dream of wandering through the ghostly forests of prehistory.

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Ssshh, it's a secret

To continue with this week's theme, which has mostly been about how completely baffling I find the behavior of my fellow humans a lot of the time, today we have: secret societies.

Which may be a misnomer.  Most of these societies are so extremely secret that you'd never ever find out about them unless you happened to read the Wikipedia page entitled "Secret Societies."  The problem is, if something was truly a secret society, we wouldn't know about it, kind of by definition.  But this would defeat the purpose, because then it would have a membership list consisting of one person (the founder), and it wouldn't be a "society" so much as "a single delusional wingnut."  So it's got to be secret (and also mystical and esoteric) enough to intrigue the absolute hell out of non-initiates, but also sufficiently well-advertised to attract a few select converts.

Which is a bit of a balancing act.

The Rose Cross symbol from the Order of the Golden Dawn [Image is in the Public Domain]

Anyhow, I did a little digging into what I could find out about the history of secret societies, and lord have mercy, there have been some doozies.  And to obviate the need of saying this over and over, I swear I'm not making any of this up.

Let's start with one that was operative in eighteenth-century Germany, but when you hear about it, you will really wish it was still around today.  It's called the Order of the Pug (German Mops-Orden), and seems to have been founded to circumvent a papal bull issued by Pope Clement XII in 1738 that forbade Catholics from being Freemasons.  So some folks got together and decided to come up with a different secret society, and they definitely pulled out all the stops.

Amongst their beliefs was an emphasis on loyalty, trustworthiness, and steadfastness, none of which I can find fault with.  But their rituals were... interesting.  During initiation, prospective candidates had to wear a dog collar and gain admittance by scratching at the door and barking.  At the climax of the ritual, the candidate had to kiss the ass of a porcelain pug statue.  After that, they were taught the society's slogans, gestures, and hand signals, at which point they were allowed to wear the group's medallion (which of course featured the face of a pug).

The whole thing was blown wide open in 1745 when a book was published in Amsterdam entitled L'Ordre des Franc-Maçons Trahi et le Secret des Mopses Révélé (The Order of the Freemasons Betrayed and the Secret of the Pugs Revealed), which resulted in most people responding with nothing more than a puzzled head-tilt.  After all, this wasn't the fifteenth century, when saying "I like pineapple on pizza" could get you burned as a witch.  So even after their secrets were exposed, no one was all that impressed.  The result was that the Pugs kind of fizzled, although apparently there was still an order practicing in Lyon in 1902.

Then we've got the Epsilon Team, which sounds like a Saturday morning superhero cartoon but isn't.  This one originated in Greece, and is a mixed-up mishmash of Greek mythology and UFOs and conspiracy theories, with a nasty streak of anti-Semitism thrown in for good measure.  The Epsilons were founded in the 1960s by a guy named George Lefkofrydis, who appears to have had a screw loose.  He claimed that there's a coded message in Aristotle's work on logic, the Organon, which reveals that Aristotle was an alien from the planet Mu in the constellation Lepus.  (The irony is not lost on me that a coded message that sounds like the result of heavy consumption of controlled substances was allegedly encrypted in a text on how to recognize fallacious arguments.)

Anyhow, Lefkofrydis's ideas somehow found favor with other Greeks who apparently spent their spare time doing sit-ups underneath parked cars, and their dogma expanded to include the following:

• the Olympian gods were going to come back and initiate a cosmic war against the Jews, who are actually also aliens
• ancient Peru was visited by the Greeks, who founded the Inca Empire
• the letter E is a symbol of the society and its goals, so wherever it appears in other languages, it was planted there as a subliminal text by the ancient Greeks

This prompts me to point out two things.

First, my wife is Jewish, and thus far I haven't seen any sign of her being an alien.  She has also yet to do battle with Zeus, Ares, Apollo, et al., but frankly, if it happens I'm putting my money on her.  She's kind of a take-no-shit type, which I suspect would still be the case if she were up against scantily-clad lightning-bolt-hurling ancient deities.

Second, the "E" thing is kind of implausible, and as a linguist, I can say this with some authority.  What, bfor th Grks wnt around and distributd thm to vrybody, did popl writ lik this?  Sms kind of inconvnint.

Conspiracy theory researcher Tao Makeef writes, showing admirable restraint, that "even amongst Greek neopagans, these beliefs are generally ridiculed."

Next there's A∴A∴, not to be confused with AA, which can stand for Alcoholics Anonymous, American Airlines, the Automobile Association, or a specific bra size.  A∴A∴ was founded by none other than Aleister Crowley, the self-styled "Wickedest Man on Earth," whose main interest seems to have been having sex with anyone of either gender who would hold still for long enough.  This is not the only secret society that Crowley founded; in fact, he started so many of them that for a while the number of Crowley's secret societies exceeded the number of actual members.  The meaning of A∴A∴ was deliberately left ambiguous -- it was said variously to stand for astrum argenteum (Latin for "silver star"), arcanum arcanorum (Latin for "secret of secrets"), Atlantean Adepts, or Angel and Abyss.  In Robert Anton Wilson's and Robert Shea's Illuminatus! trilogy, though, they say it doesn't stand for anything; that the true adepts somehow intuit what it means, so anyone making a claim about what it stands for is just illustrating that they're not really a member.

That's how esoteric and secret A∴A∴ is.

To move your way up through the A∴A∴ ranks, you have to do stuff like "acquire perfect control of the body of light on the astral plane" and "learn the formula of the Rose Cross" and "cross the great gulf or void between the phenomenal world of manifestation and its noumenal source, that great spiritual wilderness."  Which I think we can all agree sound impressive as hell.

Last, we have the Temple of Black Light, also called the Misanthropic Luciferian Order, founded in 1995 in Sweden by a guy named Shahin Khoshnood as an offshoot of a group called the True Satanist Horde, apparently because the latter weren't batshit crazy enough.  The members of the Temple of Black Light believed in "Azerate," the extremely secret "hidden name of the eleven cosmic anti-gods," which became significantly less hidden when Khoshnood published a book about it.  The central tenet of the Temple is the worship of chaos, and the claim that God regretted having created the universe with all its laws and scientific principles and whatnot, and wished he'd left well enough alone and stuck with the whole formless and void thing of Genesis 1:1.  What we should all be doing, they say, is trying to get back to chaos, and I have to say that at the moment the Republican Party is doing a damn good job of it here in the United States.  

Anyhow, the appeal is that unlike our boring old three-spatial-dimensions-plus-time universe, chaos is supposedly "an infinidimensional and pandimensional plane of possibilities."  Whatever the fuck that means.

Ultimately, though, Khoshnood was discovered not only to be a wacko cult leader, but a homicidal maniac, and once he was arrested and charged with murder, very quickly the other members of the Temple noped their way right out of any association with him.  So I guess we're going to have to put up with our current orderly universe for a while longer, such as it is.

Anyhow, those are just four of hundreds.  I encourage you to peruse the Wikipedia page, especially if you want to significantly diminish your opinion of the intelligence of humanity as a whole.

Now, y'all'll have to excuse me, because I need to go work on my anatomically-correct ceramic statue of a pug.  Not for any reason in particular, mind you.  I just... um... wanted to make one.

Woof.

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Taken by the flood

It amazes me the mental gymnastics the biblical fundamentalists will go through to use scientific studies to shore up their contention that the Bible is literally, word-for-word true.

We've seen this sort of pretzel logic here before, of course.  Eleven years ago I did a piece about a cool scientific discovery that a mineral called ringwoodite, which contains about one percent (by mass) chemically-bound water, was abundant in the Earth's mantle, which prompted the biblical literalists to jump up and down yelling, "See?  We told you.  That's where all the water went after the Great Flood!  Ha!  Q.E.D."  A few also pointed out that in Genesis 7:11 we read that God "broke up the fountains of the deep," so this could also have been the source of some of the flood waters as well.

Never mind that the ringwoodite is six hundred or more kilometers beneath the Earth's surface, and if God "broke up the fountains" to that extent, what would come out would not be water but superheated magma.

So more flood basalt than conventional flood, really.  Not something you'd want to float your Ark on, especially if it was made of wood.

It was with only mild surprise that I saw similar reactions to a study that came out this week from the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.  You might recall that earlier this week I alluded to the Zanclean Flood -- the astonishing event that occurred about 5.3 million years ago, where plate movement temporarily closed off the Straits of Gibraltar, resulting in the Mediterranean Sea drying up almost completely.  This was followed by a sudden re-opening of the gap and the creation of the Mother of All Waterfalls over the Gibraltar Sill, at its peak refilling the Mediterranean at a rate of an astonishing ten meters a day.

What I didn't know was that apparently a similar thing happened to the Red Sea.  It shouldn't have been a surprise, really; the Red Sea is like the Mediterranean in having only a single narrow connection to the world's oceans (the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb), if you don't count the Suez Canal.  It's also a tectonically-active region, with the Red Sea Rift underlying the entire thing lengthwise, terminating at its south end in the geologically complex Afar Triple Junction.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Eric Gaba (Sting - fr:Sting), Red Sea topographic map-en, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Well, the research found geological evidence of a similar scenario to the Zanclean Flood; a tectonic shift closing off the strait, followed by evaporation of nearly all of the water, followed by a second shift reopening the strait and refilling the sea.  "Our findings show that the Red Sea basin records one of the most extreme environmental events on Earth, when it dried out completely and was then suddenly reflooded," said study lead author Tihana Pensa.  "The flood transformed the basin, restored marine conditions, and established the Red Sea's lasting connection to the Indian Ocean."

I'm guessing y'all can see where this is going.

The fundamentalists are twisting themselves into knots saying, "See?  We told you.  Moses parting the Red Sea, Pharaoh's army, the waters rushing back!  Ha!  Q.E.D."

Well, needless to say -- or, more accurately, I wish it was needless to say -- there are a few holes in this claim.

First, the study at KAUST explicitly says that the transformation from salty desert back to a water-filled Red Sea was far slower than the Zanclean Flood, and is estimated to have taken a hundred thousand years.  So Pharaoh's army must have been really slow on the uptake.  If they couldn't get out of the way of a flood creeping along at that rate, they deserved everything they got.

Second, the biblical apologists also conveniently leave out that the study found the Red Sea flood happened 6.2 million years ago -- so almost a million years before the much bigger Zanclean Flood.  At this point, there were no modern humans around, and wouldn't be for about another five million years.  Our likely ancestor who would have been alive back then was Orrorin tugenensis, who has been reconstructed to look something like this:

I don't know about you, but when I picture the characters from the Old Testament, this isn't the image that comes to mind.  Although I have to say, it would have made the movie The Ten Commandments a lot more entertaining:

Moses:  Fear not!  The Lord of Hosts will do battle for us!

Israelites:  *excited hooting, one of them throws a femur into the air*

However, the people who can already twist their logical faculties around enough to believe that the Bible is the literal truth will also happily conclude that (1) the KAUST team got the chronology wrong by a factor of 1,000, and (2) the Red Sea could have filled a lot faster than that, because God.

Oh, and (3) why are there still monkeys?

You can not win with these people.  Funny the confidence you can get from assuming your conclusion.

Anyhow.  My general opinion is if you want to believe the Bible is the infallible Word of God, knock yourself out.  As long as you don't try to get it taught as science in public schools, you can believe the universe was created by a Giant Green Bunny from the Andromeda Galaxy, as far as I care.  But a word of advice -- when you start cherry-picking convenient bits of science to support Fundamentalist Bunnyology, and avoiding the much more numerous bits that contradict it, I reserve the right to make fun of you.

Not that I expect it to have any effect.  The creationists, I've found, are as impervious as Noah's lava-proof Ark.

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Ghost purchases

It seems like every day I'm forced to face the unfortunate fact that I don't seem to understand my fellow humans very well.

All I have to do is to get on social media or -- worse -- read the news, and over and over again I think, "Why in the hell would someone do that?"  Or say that?  Or think that?  Now, I hasten to add that it's not that I believe everyone should think like me; far from it.  It's more that a lot of the stuff people argue about are either (1) matters of fact, that have been settled by science years ago, or (2) matters of opinion -- taste in art, music, books, food, television and movies, and so forth -- despite the fact that "matters of opinion" kind of by definition means "there's no objectively right answer."  In fact, at its basis, this penchant toward fighting endlessly over everything is a good first choice for "things I completely don't understand about people."

As an aside, this is why the thing I keep seeing on social media that goes, "What is your favorite _____, and why is it _____?" is so profoundly irritating.  (The latest one I saw, just this morning: "What is your favorite science fiction novel, and why is it Dune?")  I know it's meant to be funny, but (1) I've now seen it 873,915 times, and any humor value it might have started with is long gone, and (2) my reaction every time is to say, "Who the fuck do you think you are, telling me what my favorite anything is?"

So, okay, maybe I also need to lighten up a little.

Anyhow, this sense of mystification when I look around me goes all the way from the deeply important (e.g., how anyone can still think it's safe to smoke) to the entirely banal (e.g. people who start brawls when their favorite sports team loses).  A lot of things fall somewhere in the middle, though, and that includes the article I ran into a couple of days ago showing that people will pay significantly more for a house if it's supposedly haunted.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The data, which came from the British marketing firm InventoryBase, looked at the prices people were willing to pay to purchase a house with an alleged ghost (or one that has a "bad reputation").  And far from being a detriment to selling, a sketchy past or resident specter is a genuine selling point.  Comparing sales prices to (1) the earlier purchase price for the same property, adjusted for inflation, and (2) the prices for comparable properties, InventoryBase found that the increase in value is significant.  In fact, in some cases, it's freakin' huge.

The most extreme example is the house in Rhode Island featured in the supposedly-based-upon-a-true-story movie The Conjuring, which was purchased for $439,000 (pre-movie) and sold for $1.2 million (post-movie).  It's hardly the only example.  The house in London that was the site of The Conjuring 2 is valued at £431,000 -- £100,000 more than it was appraised for in 2016.

Doesn't take a movie to make the price go up.  "The Cage," a house that was the site of a medieval prison in the village of St. Osyth in Essex, England, has been called one of the most haunted sites in Britain -- and is valued at 17% higher than comparable properties.  Even more extreme is 39 DeGrey Street in Hull, which has a 53% higher appraisal value than comparables, despite the fact that the house has a reputation for such terrifying apparitions that "no one is willing to live in it."

InventoryBase found several examples of houses that were objectively worse than nearby similar homes -- badly in need of remodeling, problems with plumbing or wiring or even structure, general shabbiness -- but they still were selling for more money because they allegedly have supernatural residents.

I read this article with a sense of bafflement.  Now, to be fair, I'd be thrilled if it turned out my house actually was haunted, primarily because it would mean that my current opinion about an afterlife was wrong.  This would require a complete reframing of my worldview, something I think I would find a fascinating challenge.  The problem is, at the same time I'm a great big coward, so the first time the ghost appeared I'd probably have a brain aneurysm, but at least then I could look forward to haunting the next resident, which could be kind of fun.

But if I was in the market for a house, it's hard for me to fathom spending tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars extra for the privilege of sharing my house with ghosts.  No, for the privilege of supposedly sharing my house with ghosts; I'm guessing in the Disclosure Statement there's no requirement for anyone to prove their house is actually haunted.  So I'd potentially be spending a year's worth of salary (or more) just for unsubstantiated bragging rights.

Anyhow, this brings me back to where I started, which is that I just don't understand my fellow humans.  A great deal of their behavior is frankly baffling to me.  Given how poorly I fit in with my blood relatives -- "black sheep of the family" doesn't even come close to describing it -- I've wondered for years if I might be a changeling.  The problem with that hypothesis is that I look exactly like my dad, so any contention that I'm not really his son is doomed to be shipwrecked on the rocks of hard evidence.

And like I said, it's not that I think my own view of the world is sacrosanct, or something.  I'm sure I'm just as weird as the next guy.  It's just that the ways I'm weird seem to be pretty different from the ways a lot of people are weird.

So maybe I shouldn't point fingers.  Other folks are weird; I'm weirdly weird.  Weird to the weirdth power.  This means that people are probably as mystified by my behavior as I am by theirs, which I guess is only fair.

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The image and the reality

In its seven-year run, Star Trek: The Next Generation had some awe-inspiring and brilliantly creative moments.  "The Inner Light," "Remember Me," "Frames of Mind," "The Best of Both Worlds," "Family," "The Next Phase," "The Drumhead," "Darmok," "Tapestry," and "Time's Arrow" remain some of the best television I've ever seen in my life.

But like any show, it had its misses.  And in my opinion, they never whiffed quite so hard as they did with the episodes "Booby Trap" and "Galaxy's Child."

In "Booby Trap," Chief Engineer Geordi LaForge is faced with trying to find a way to get the Enterprise out of a snare designed millennia ago by a long-gone species, and decides to consult Leah Brahms -- well, a holographic representation of Dr. Brahms, anyway -- the engineering genius who had been one of the principal designers of the ship.  Brahms knows the systems inside and out, and LaForge works with her avatar to devise a way to escape the trap.  He'd always idolized her, and now he finds himself falling for the holodeck facsimile he'd created.  He and Brahms figure out a way out of the booby trap of the episode's title, and in the end, they kiss as he ends the program and returns to the real world.

If that weren't cringe-y enough, Brahms returns (for real) in "Galaxy's Child," where she is conducting an inspection to analyze changes LaForge had made to her design (and of which she clearly disapproves).  LaForge acts as if he already knows her, when in reality they'd never met, and Brahms very quickly senses that something's off.  For LaForge's part, he's startled by how prickly she is, and more than a little alarmed when he realizes she's not only not interested in him romantically -- she's (happily) married.

Brahms does some digging and discovers that LaForge had created a holographic avatar of her, and then uncovers the unsettling fact that he and the facsimile have been romantically involved.  She is understandably furious.  But here's where the writers of the show took a hard swing, and missed completely; LaForge reacts not with contrition and shame, but with anger.  We're clearly meant to side with him -- it's no coincidence that Brahms is depicted as cold, distant, and hypercritical, while LaForge of course is a long-standing and beloved character.

And Brahms backs down.  In what is supposed to be a heartwarming moment, they set aside their differences and address the problem at hand (an alien creature that is draining the Enterprise's energy) and end the episode as friends.

The writers of the show often took a hard look at good characters who make mistakes or are put into situations where they have to fight against their own faults to make the right choices.  (Look at Ensign Ro Laren's entire story arc, for example.)  They could have had LaForge admit that what he'd done was creepy, unethical, and a horrible invasion of Dr. Brahms's privacy, but instead they chose to have the victim back off in order to give the recurring character a win.

The reason this comes up is because once again, Star Trek has proven prescient, but not by giving us what we desperately want from it -- faster-than-light travel, replicators, transporters, and tricorders.

What we're getting is a company selling us an opportunity to do what Geordi LaForge did to Leah Brahms.

A few months ago, I did a piece here at Skeptophilia about advertisements on Instagram trying to get me to sign up for an "AI boyfriend."  Needless to say -- well, I hope it's needless to say -- I'm not interested.  For one thing, my wife would object.  For another, those sorts of parasocial relationships (one-sided relationships with fictional characters) are, to put it mildly, unhealthy.  Okay, I can watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer and be attracted to Buffy and Angel in equal measures (ah, the perils of being bisexual), but I'm in no sense "in love with" either of them.

But an ad I saw on Instagram yesterday goes beyond just generating a drop-dead gorgeous AI creation who will (their words) "always be there waiting for you" and "never say no."  Because this one said that if you want to make your online lover look like someone you know -- "an ex, a crush, a colleague" -- they're happy to oblige.

What this company -- "Dialogue by Pheon" -- is offering doesn't just cross the line into unacceptable, it sprints across it and goes about a thousand miles farther.  I'll go so far as to say that in "Booby Trap," what LaForge did was at least motivated by good intentions, even if in the end it went way too far.  Here, a company is explicitly advertising something that is intended for nothing more than sexual gratification, and saying they're just thrilled to violate someone else's privacy in order to do it.

What will it take for lawmakers to step in and pull back the reins on AI, to say, "this has gone far enough"?  There's already AI simulation of the voices of famous singers; two years ago, the wonderful YouTuber Rick Beato sounded the alarm over the creation of "new songs" by Kurt Cobain and John Lennon, which sounded eerily convincing (and the technology has only improved since then).  It brings up questions we've never had to consider.  Who owns the rights to your voice?  Who owns your appearance?  So far, as long as something is labeled accurately -- a track is called "AI Taylor Swift," and not misrepresented as the real thing -- the law hasn't wanted to touch the "creators" (if I can dignify them by that name).

Will the same apply if some guy takes your image and uses it to create an online AI boy/girlfriend who will "do anything and never say no"?

The whole thing is so skeevy it makes me feel like I need to go take another shower.

These companies are, to put it bluntly, predatory.  They have zero regard for the mental health of their customers; they are taking advantage of people's loneliness and disconnection to sell them something that in the end will only bring the problem into sharper focus.  And now, they're saying they'll happily victimize not only their customers, but random people the customers happen to know.  Provide us with a photograph and a nice chunk of money, they say, and we'll create an AI lover who looks like anyone you want.

Of course, we don't have a prayer of a chance of getting any action from the current regime here in the United States.  Trump's attitude toward AI is the more and the faster, the better.  They've basically deregulated the industry entirely, looking toward creating "global AI dominance," damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.  If some people get hurt along the way, well, that's a sacrifice they're willing to make.

Corporate capitalism über alles, as usual.

It's why I personally have taken a "no AI, never, no way, no how" approach.  Yes, I know it has promising applications.  Yes, I know many of its uses are interesting or entertaining.  But until we have a way to put up some guard rails, and to keep unscrupulous companies from taking advantage of people's isolation and unfulfilled sex drive to turn a quick buck, and to keep them from profiting off the hard work of actual creative human beings, the AI techbros can fuck right off.

No, farther than that.

I wish I could end on some kind of hopeful note.  The whole thing leaves me feeling sick.  And as the technology continues to improve -- which it's currently doing at an exponential rate -- the whole situation is only going to get worse.

And now I think I need to get off the computer and go do something real for a while.

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Island of the dolls

One of the very first topics I addressed here at Skeptophilia -- only a few months after I started, in fall of 2010 -- was the idea of the uncanny valley.

The term was coined by Japanese robotics engineer Masahiro Mori way back in 1970, in his book Bukimi No Tani (不気味の谷), the title of which roughly translates to it.  The idea, which you're probably familiar with, is that if you map out our emotional response to a face as a function of its proximity to a normal human face, you find a fascinating pattern.  Faces very different from our own -- animal faces, stuffed toys, and stylized faces (like the famous "smiley face"), for example -- usually elicit positive, or at least neutral, responses.  Normal human faces, of course, are usually viewed positively.

Where you run into trouble is when a face is kinda similar to a human face, but not similar enough.  This is why clowns frequently trigger fear rather than amusement.  You may recall that the animators of the 2004 movie The Polar Express ran headlong into this, when the animation of the characters, especially the Train Conductor (who was supposed to be a nice character), freaked kids out instead of charming them.  Roboticists have been trying like mad to create a humanoid robot whose face doesn't elicit people to recoil with horror, with (thus far) little success.

That dip in the middle, between very non-human faces and completely human ones, is what Mori called "the uncanny valley."

Why this happens is a matter of conjecture.  Some psychologists have speculated that the not-quite-human-enough faces that elicit the strongest negative reactions often have a flat affect and a mask-like quality, which might act as primal triggers warning us about people with severe mental disorders like psychosis.  But the human psyche is a complex place, and it may well be that the reasons for the near-universal terror sparked by characters like The Gangers in the Doctor Who episode "The Almost People" are multifaceted.

What's certain is this aversion to faces in the uncanny valley exists across cultures.  Take, for example, a place I found out about only yesterday -- Mexico's Isla de las Muñecas, the "Island of the Dolls."

The island is in Lake Xochimilco, south of Mexico City, and it was owned by a peculiar recluse named Don Julián Santana Barrera.  Some time in the 1940s, so the story goes, Barrera found the body of a girl who had drowned in the shallows of the lake (another version is that he saw her drowning and was unable to save her).  The day after she died, Barrera found a doll floating in the water, and he became convinced that it was the girl's spirit returning.  So he put the doll on display, and started looking through the washed up flotsam and jetsam for more.

He found more.  Then he started trading produce he'd raised with the locals for more dolls.  Ultimately it became an obsession, and in the next five decades he collected over a thousand of them (along with assorted parts).  The place became a site for pilgrims, who were convinced that the dolls housed the spirits of the dead.  Legends arose that visitors saw the dolls moving or opening their eyes -- and that some heard them whispering to each other.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Amrith Raj, Dolls hung in Santana Barrera's chinampa in Xochimilco, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Barrera himself died in 2001 under (very) mysterious circumstances.  His nephew had come to help him -- at that point he was around eighty years old -- and the two were out fishing in the lake when the old man became convinced he heard mermaids calling to him.  The nephew rowed them both to shore and went to get assistance, but when he returned his uncle was face down in the water, drowned...

... at the same spot where he'd discovered the little girl's body, over fifty years earlier.

Since then, the island has been popular as a destination for dark tourism -- the attraction some people have for places associated with injury, death, or tragedy.  It was the filming location for the extremely creepy music video Lady Gaga released just a month ago, "The Dead Dance."

There's no doubt that dolls fall squarely into the uncanny valley for a lot of people.  Their still, unchanging expressions are right in that middle ground between being human and non-human.  (Explaining the success of horror flicks like Chucky and M3gan.)

And you can see why Mexico's Island of the Dolls has the draw it does.  You don't even need to believe in disembodied spirits of the dead to get the chills from it.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Esparta Palma, Xochimilco Dolls' Island, CC BY 2.0]

What astonishes me, though, is that Barrera himself wanted to live there.  I mean, I'm a fairly staunch disbeliever in all things paranormal, and those things still strike me as scary as fuck.

If I ever visit Mexico, I might be persuaded to go to the island.  But no way in hell would I spend the night there.

Just because I'm a skeptic doesn't mean I'm not suggestible.  In fact, the case could be argued that I became a skeptic precisely because I'm so suggestible.  After all, the other option was running around making little whimpering noises all the time, which is kind of counterproductive.

In any case, I'll be curious to hear what my readers think.  Are you susceptible to the uncanny valley?  Or resistant enough that you'd stay overnight on Isla de las Muñecas?

Maybe bring along a clown, for good measure?

Me, I'm creeped out just thinking about it.

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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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