Can't win, can't break even

Dear readers,

I'm going to take a short break from Skeptophilia -- my next post will be Thursday, November 18.  I'll still be lining up topics during the time I'm away, so keep those suggestions coming!

cheers,

Gordon

**********************************

One of the most misunderstood laws of physics is the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Honestly, I understand why.  It's one of those bits of science that seem simple on first glance, then the more you learn, the weirder it gets.  The simplest way to state the Second Law is "systems tend to proceed toward disorder," so on the surface it's so common-sensical that it triggers nothing more than a shrug and, "Well, of course."  But a lot of its ramifications are seriously non-intuitive, and a few are downright mindblowing.

The other problem with it is that it exists in multiple formulations that seem to have nothing to do with one another.  These include:

• the aforementioned statement that without an energy input, over time, systems become more disordered.
• if you place a warm object and cool object in contact with each other, energy will flow from the warmer to the cooler; the warmer object will cool off, and the cooler one will heat up, until they reach thermal equilibrium (equal temperatures).
• no machine can run at 100% efficiency (i.e., turning all of its energy input into usable work).
• some processes are irreversible; for example, there's nothing odd about knocking a wine glass off the table and shattering it, but if you were watching and the shards gathered themselves back together and leapt off the floor and back onto the table as an intact wine glass, you might wonder if all you'd been drinking was wine.

The fact that all of these are, at their basis, different ways of stating the same physical law is not obvious.

For me, the easiest way to understand the "why" of the Second Law has to do with a deck of playing cards.  Let's say you have a deck in order; each suit arranged from ace to king, and the four suits in the order hearts, spades, diamonds, clubs.  How many possible ways are there to arrange the cards in exactly that way?

Duh.  Only one, by definition.

Now, let's say you accidentally drop the deck, then pick it up.  Unless you flung the deck across the room, chances are, there will still be some of the cards in the original order, but some of the orderliness will probably have been lost.  Why?  Because there's only a single way to arrange the cards in the order you started with, but there are lots of ways to have them mostly out of order.  The chances of jumping from the single orderly state to one of the many disorderly states is a near certainty.  Then you drop them again (you're having a clumsy day, apparently).  Are they more likely to become more disordered or more orderly?

You see where this is going; since at each round, there are way more disorderly states than orderly ones, just by the laws of statistics you're almost certainly going to watch the deck becoming progressively more disordered.  Yes, it's possible that you could take a completely random deck, toss them in the air, and they'd fall into ace-through-king, hearts-spades-diamonds-clubs -- but if you're waiting for that to happen by random chance, you're going to have a long wait.

You can, of course, force them back into order by painstakingly rearranging the cards, but that takes an input of energy (in the form of your brain and muscles using up chemical energy to accomplish it).  And here's where it gets weird; if you were to measure the decrease in entropy (disorder) in the deck of cards as you rearranged them, it would be outweighed by the increase in entropy of the energy-containing molecules you burned through to do it.  The outcome: you can locally and temporarily decrease entropy, but only at the expense of creating more entropy somewhere else.  Everything we do makes things more chaotic, and any decrease in entropy we see is illusory.  In the end, entropy always wins.

As my long-ago thermodynamics professor told us, "The First Law of Thermodynamics says that you can't win.  The Second Law says you can't break even."

Hell of a way to run a casino, that.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The reason this all comes up is a paper that a friend of mine sent me a link to, which looks at yet another way of characterizing the Second Law; instead of heat transfer or overall orderliness, it considers entropy as a measure of information content.  The less information you need to describe a system, the lower its entropy; in the example of the deck of cards, I was able to describe the orderly state in seven words (ace-through-king, hearts-spades-diamonds-clubs).  High-entropy states require a lot of information; pick any of the out-of-order arrangements of the deck of cards, and pretty much the only way to describe it is to list each card individually from the top of the deck to the bottom.

The current paper has to do with information stored inside machines, and like many formulations of the Second Law, it results in some seriously weird implications.  Consider, for example, a simple operation on a calculator -- 2+2, for example.  When you press the "equals" sign, and the calculator tells you the answer is four, have you lost information, or gained it?

Most people, myself included, would have guessed that you've gained information; you now know that 2+2=4, if you didn't already know that.  In a thermodynamic sense, though, you've lost information.  When you get the output (4), you irreversibly erase the input (2+2).  Think about going the other way, and it becomes clearer; someone gives you the output (4) and asks you what the input was.

No way to tell.  There are, in fact, an infinite number of arithmetic operations that would give you the answer "4".  What a calculator does is time-irreversible.  "Computing systems are designed specifically to lose information about their past as they evolve," said study co-author David Wolpert, of the Santa Fe Institute.

By reducing the information in the calculator, you're decreasing its entropy (the answer has less information than the input did).  And that means that the calculator is increasing entropy more somewhere else -- in this case, it heats up the surrounding air.

And that's one reason why your calculator gets warm when you use it.  "There's this deep relationship between physics and information theory," said study co-author Artemy Kolchinsky.  "If you erase a bit of information, you have to generate a little bit of heat."

But if everything you do ultimately increases the overall entropy, what does that say about the universe as a whole?

The implication is that the entire universe's entropy was at a minimum at its creation in the Big Bang -- that it started out extremely ordered, with very low information content.  Everything that's happened since has stirred things up and made them more chaotic (i.e., requiring more information for a complete description).  Eventually, the universe will reach a state of maximal disorder, and after that, it's pretty much game over; you're stuck there for the foreseeable future.  This state goes by the cheerful name the "heat death of the universe."

Not to worry, though.  It won't happen for a while, and we've got more pressing matters to attend to in the interim.

To end on a positive note, though -- going back to our original discussion of the increase of entropy as stemming from the likelihood of jumping from a disordered state back to an orderly one, recall that the chance isn't zero, it's just really really really small.  So once the heat death of the universe has occurred, there is a non-zero chance that it will spontaneously come back together into a second very-low-entropy singularity, at which point the whole thing starts over.  Yeah, it's unlikely, but once the universe is in heat death, it's not like it's got much else to do besides wait.

*********************************************

If Monday's post, about the apparent unpredictability of the eruption of the Earth's volcanoes, freaked you out, you should read Robin George Andrews's wonderful new book Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal About the Earth and the Worlds Beyond.

Andrews, a science journalist and trained volcanologist, went all over the world interviewing researchers on the cutting edge of the science of volcanoes -- including those that occur not only here on Earth, but on the Moon, Mars, Venus, and elsewhere.  The book is fascinating enough just from the human aspect of the personalities involved in doing primary research, but looks at a topic it's hard to imagine anyone not being curious about; the restless nature of geology that has generated such catastrophic events as the Yellowstone Supereruptions.

Andrews does a great job not only demystifying what's going on inside volcanoes and faults, but informing us how little we know (especially in the sections on the Moon and Mars, which have extinct volcanoes scientists have yet to completely explain).  Along the way we get the message, "Will all you people just calm down a little?", particularly aimed at the purveyors of hype who have for years made wild claims about the likelihood of an eruption at Yellowstone occurring soon (turns out it's very low) and the chances of a supereruption somewhere causing massive climate change and wiping out humanity (not coincidentally, also very low).

Volcanoes, Andrews says, are awesome, powerful, and fascinating, but if you have a modicum of good sense, nothing to fret about.  And his book is a brilliant look at the natural process that created a great deal of the geology of the Earth and our neighbor planets -- plate tectonics.  If you are interested in geology or just like a wonderful and engrossing book, you should put Super Volcanoes on your to-read list.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Shame, lying, and Archie Bunker

One of my sensitive spots has to do with embarrassment.  Not only do I hate being embarrassed myself, I hate watching other people in embarrassing situations.  I remember as a kid detesting sitcoms in which a character (however richly deserving) was made to look a fool -- the sensation was close to physical pain.

Of course, it's worse when it's a real person, and worst of all when (s)he doesn't realize what's going on.

This whole wince-inducing topic comes up because of a wonderful academic paper called "Cooperation Creates Selection for Tactical Deception," by Luke McNally and Andrew L. Jackson of Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland).  The paper describes research into the evolution of deception, and is a sterling piece of work, showing how a game-theoretical model of cooperation results in selective pressure favoring "tactical deception" -- better known as lying.

"Our results suggest that the evolution of conditional strategies may, in addition to promoting cooperation, select for astute cheating and associated psychological abilities," the authors write.  "Ultimately, our ability to convincingly lie to each other may have evolved as a direct result of our cooperative nature."

It's a fascinating piece of research, and it generated some buzz in the media -- even meriting an (also nicely done) summary in HuffPost Science.

So far, what's the problem?  A well-written paper on how game theory predicts the evolution of behavior, and the media (for once) reporting it as they should.  No cause for wincing here, surely?

Nope.  The winces started once the creationists got wind of this.

The site Creation Evolution Headlines evidently found out about McNally and Jackson's paper -- although whether they actually read it remains to be seen.  Because the piece they wrote in response is called...

... wait for it...

"Evolutionists Confess to Lying."

Yes, you're interpreting this correctly; they think that because the paper supports an evolutionary edge for people who are deceptive, it is equivalent to the evolutionary biologists stating, "Ha ha!  We were lying all along!"

I couldn't make something this ridiculous up if I wanted to.

Don't believe me?  Here is an excerpt.  Make sure you have a pillow handy for when you faceplant.

If lying evolved as a fitness strategy, can we believe anything an evolutionist says?...  Brooks [the author of the HuffPost piece] has the Yoda complex.  So do McNally and Jackson.  They believe they can look down on the rest of humanity from some exalted plane free of the evolutionary forces that afflict the rest of humanity.  No; they need to climb down and join the world their imaginations have created.  In the evolutionary world, there is no essential difference between cooperation and deception.  It’s only a matter of which side is in the majority at the moment...

Having no eternal standard of truth, the evolutionary world collapses into power struggles.  The appeals by Brooks and Sam Harris to try to “resist our temptations to lie” are meaningless.  How can anyone overcome what evolution has built into them?  How can either of them know what is true? 

Since all these evolutionists believe that lying evolved as a fitness strategy, and since they are unable to distinguish between truth and lies, they essentially confess to lying themselves.  Their readers are therefore justified in considering them deceivers, and dismissing everything they say, including the notion that lying evolved.

My wincing-at-people-embarrassing-themselves response was activated so strongly by all this that I could barely tolerate reading the entire article... especially given that the Creation Evolution Headlines piece got linked on the Skeptic subreddit by the obviously astonished friend of one of the original paper's authors.  (Of course, you're probably thinking, "If you hate seeing people embarrassed so much, why are you calling further attention to it by writing about it?"  To which I can only respond: touché.  And also, that my outrage over a nice bit of evolutionary research being trashed this way trumped my dislike of watching morons shame themselves.)

Let's just take this a piece at a time, okay?

First, McNally and Jackson didn't say that everyone is lying; they said that some people are lying, and benefit by it, a contention that I'd guess atheists and theists would both agree on.  Second, given that the original research looked at cooperative species -- of which there are many -- why does that somehow turn evolution into "power struggles," into a world of every individual for him/herself?  Do ants in a colony only cooperate because they recognize an "eternal standard of truth?"

And I always find it wryly amusing when the theists claim that we atheists must be without morals because we don't think morality comes from some higher power, and suggest that we aren't to be trusted.  Honestly, devout Christians; if the only thing that's keeping you from running around stealing, raping, and murdering is some Bronze Age book of mythology, I think you are the ones we should be watching out for.

As Penn Gillette more eloquently put it, "The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want?  And my answer is: I do rape all I want.  And the amount I want is zero.  And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero.  The fact that these people think that if they didn’t have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine."

But as far as the McNally/Jackson paper goes, the creationists are missing the most basic problem with their claim.  Saying that lying is an evolved strategy doesn't mean that we "are unable to distinguish between truth and lies."  If evolutionists were unable to distinguish between truth and lies, IT WOULD BE REALLY FUCKING HARD TO WRITE A SCHOLARLY PAPER ABOUT LYING, NOW WOULDN'T IT?

*pant pant gasp gasp*

Okay, I'll try to calm down a little.

What's the worst about these people is that they don't seem to have any awareness that what they're saying, with apparent confidence, is absolute nonsense.  It reminds me of watching the character of Archie Bunker on the 70s television series All in the Family, who week after week would have conversations like the following:

Mike (Archie's son-in-law): Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

Archie: Denmark ain't no state, it's the capital of Colorado.

And, of course, Archie would never admit that he was wrong.  In his reality, he was always right, world without end, amen.

I bet Archie would have loved that article in Creation Evolution Headlines.  And he'd probably look at me and say, as he did to once to his wife, "You don't believe in nothin', Edith.  You're one o' them, whaddyacallem, septics."

*********************************************

If Monday's post, about the apparent unpredictability of the eruption of the Earth's volcanoes, freaked you out, you should read Robin George Andrews's wonderful new book Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal About the Earth and the Worlds Beyond.

Andrews, a science journalist and trained volcanologist, went all over the world interviewing researchers on the cutting edge of the science of volcanoes -- including those that occur not only here on Earth, but on the Moon, Mars, Venus, and elsewhere.  The book is fascinating enough just from the human aspect of the personalities involved in doing primary research, but looks at a topic it's hard to imagine anyone not being curious about; the restless nature of geology that has generated such catastrophic events as the Yellowstone Supereruptions.

Andrews does a great job not only demystifying what's going on inside volcanoes and faults, but informing us how little we know (especially in the sections on the Moon and Mars, which have extinct volcanoes scientists have yet to completely explain).  Along the way we get the message, "Will all you people just calm down a little?", particularly aimed at the purveyors of hype who have for years made wild claims about the likelihood of an eruption at Yellowstone occurring soon (turns out it's very low) and the chances of a supereruption somewhere causing massive climate change and wiping out humanity (not coincidentally, also very low).

Volcanoes, Andrews says, are awesome, powerful, and fascinating, but if you have a modicum of good sense, nothing to fret about.  And his book is a brilliant look at the natural process that created a great deal of the geology of the Earth and our neighbor planets -- plate tectonics.  If you are interested in geology or just like a wonderful and engrossing book, you should put Super Volcanoes on your to-read list.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Prelude to a detonation

Even though in general I don't think synchronicity Means Anything, there's no doubt that it can be pretty peculiar.

For example, it seems like in the last few days the universe has tried to get me to think about volcanoes.  First, Scientific American recently featured in their "New Books" column Robin George Andrews's Super Volcanoes, and given my fascination with volcanoes in general I had to get it (and it impressed me enough that it's this week's book-of-the-week).  Andrews's book goes a long way toward dispelling a lot of the hype around places like Yellowstone (no, it's not on the verge of an eruption), and has a lot of cool interviews with volcanologists, much in the style of the wonderful essayist John McPhee.  Only a couple of days after I started reading it, a friend sent me a link to the Naked Science YouTube video "Supervolcanoes," which seemed to be the anti-Andrews; if I can sum it up, it would be "WE'RE ALL FUCKED RUN FOR YOUR LIFE."  It isn't terrible, and does include some actual science, but the most striking thing about it is a CGI rendition of Yellowstone blowing sky-high which they use over and over and over and over in the fifty-minute-long video, as if they'd paid somebody a hefty sum to do the rendering, and by god, they were gonna get their money's worth out of it.

Then, just yesterday, a (different) friend sent me a link to a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that kind of splits the difference between Naked Science's screaming alarmism and Andrews's breeziness; it looks at the scarily huge Mount Toba volcano in Indonesia, and comes to the unsettling conclusions that (1) it definitely will erupt again, and (2) we probably won't have much warning when it does.

The last significant eruption of Toba was about 74,000 years ago, and was a VEI8 -- the highest ranking on the Volcanic Explosivity Index -- releasing an estimated three thousand cubic kilometers of ash and lava, and causing a worldwide (if temporary) drop in average temperature by about three degrees Celsius.  (For comparison, this is over seven hundred times the volume ejected by the May 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens.)  The eruption blew the entire top of the mountain clean off, and the evacuation of the magma chamber beneath it caused the caldera to collapse.  It filled with water, and is now a beautiful -- and seemingly peaceful -- crater lake, Lake Toba.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Visions of Domino, Indonesia - Lake Toba (26224127503), CC BY 2.0]

The operative word here is "seemingly."  The processes that caused the original eruption, mostly the subduction of the Indian and Australian Tectonic Plates beneath the Sunda Plate, continue to cause massive earthquakes including the colossal (9.2 on the Richter Scale) Sumatra-Andaman Earthquake of December 2004, which killed over 225,000 people.  In the case of Toba, the magma chamber has been steadily refilling, and now contains an estimated 50,000 cubic kilometers of magma -- four times the volume of Lake Superior.  This refilling has pushed the entire caldera upward, lifting Samosir Island and the Uluan Peninsula an estimated 450 meters.

It's hard to talk about this without lapsing into superlatives.  The scariest thing about it, though, is that the recent study indicates that such volcanoes can seem quiescent until -- well, until they aren't any more.  "[W]ith few super-eruptions in the last two million years, it is not possible for us to obtain statistically significant values for the frequency of these catastrophic events at a global scale," said study co-author Ping-Ping Liu of Peking University, in a press release from the Université de Genève.  "Our study also shows that no extreme events occur before a super-eruption.  This suggests that signs of an impending super-eruption, such as a significant increase in earthquakes or rapid ground uplift, might not be as obvious as pictured in disaster movies by the film industry.  At Toba volcano, everything is happening silently underground."

The reassuring part is "not as obvious" doesn't mean "without any warning;" the entire Indonesian archipelago is an area of intense study by volcanologists and seismologists, and it's likely there'd be enough anomalous activity to give us at least a hint that an eruption was impending.  Whether we'd do much about it in the form of evacuations is another matter.  Sumatra (where the volcano is located) and the nearby island of Bali are densely populated, and the idea of getting all those people out (to where?) makes the phrase "mammoth undertaking" a significant understatement.  And for those of you who like certainty, the current study doesn't give us any clear idea of exactly when the next big eruption will occur, just that (1) it's inevitable, (2) when it does, it'll be bad, (3) the filling of the magma chamber is still happening, and (4) there are signs that the volcanic activity at Toba and the surrounding regions is speeding up.

"[There's been a] progressive increase of the temperature of the continental crust in which Toba’s magma reservoir is assembled," Liu said.  "The input of magma has gradually heated the surrounding continental crust, which makes the magma cool slower.  This is a ‘vicious circle’ of eruptions: the more the magma heats the crust, the slower the magma cools and the faster the rate of magma accumulation becomes.  The result is that super-eruptions can become more frequent in time."

So there's your cheerful news of the day.  As far as the synchronicity aspect of this, I'm not gonna make much of it.  The fact that two different friends know enough of my obsession with volcanoes and earthquakes to send me the link to the YouTube video and paper is hardly to be wondered at.  As far as the book review, it's no wonder I noticed it given that the tile of the book is Super Volcanoes.  I don't think this is some kind of cosmic warning that we're about to get blown to smithereens.

So if you were looking for an excuse to stay home from work this week, you'll probably have to come up with a different one.

*********************************************

If Monday's post, about the apparent unpredictability of the eruption of the Earth's volcanoes, freaked you out, you should read Robin George Andrews's wonderful new book Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal About the Earth and the Worlds Beyond.

Andrews, a science journalist and trained volcanologist, went all over the world interviewing researchers on the cutting edge of the science of volcanoes -- including those that occur not only here on Earth, but on the Moon, Mars, Venus, and elsewhere.  The book is fascinating enough just from the human aspect of the personalities involved in doing primary research, but looks at a topic it's hard to imagine anyone not being curious about; the restless nature of geology that has generated such catastrophic events as the Yellowstone Supereruptions.

Andrews does a great job not only demystifying what's going on inside volcanoes and faults, but informing us how little we know (especially in the sections on the Moon and Mars, which have extinct volcanoes scientists have yet to completely explain).  Along the way we get the message, "Will all you people just calm down a little?", particularly aimed at the purveyors of hype who have for years made wild claims about the likelihood of an eruption at Yellowstone occurring soon (turns out it's very low) and the chances of a supereruption somewhere causing massive climate change and wiping out humanity (not coincidentally, also very low).

Volcanoes, Andrews says, are awesome, powerful, and fascinating, but if you have a modicum of good sense, nothing to fret about.  And his book is a brilliant look at the natural process that created a great deal of the geology of the Earth and our neighbor planets -- plate tectonics.  If you are interested in geology or just like a wonderful and engrossing book, you should put Super Volcanoes on your to-read list.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The ghoul's head and the three-body problem

Ever heard of Algol?

Known to astronomers as Beta Persei, it's the second-brightest star in the constellation of Perseus.  It was singled out as strange a long time ago.  Even in a small telescope it looks like a single star, but in 1881 it became the first identified eclipsing binary, a pair of stars orbiting around a common center of gravity with the orbital plane lined up so that from our perspective, one passes in front of the other.  Because one of the stars is dimmer than the other, when the dimmer one crosses in front of the brighter one, the brightness of the pair appears to diminish -- the transit takes ten hours and happens every 2.86 days, so it's regular as clockwork.

The first certain mention of Algol's variability was by Italian astronomer Geminiano Montanari in 1667, but way before that the star had a reputation for being uncanny.  The name Algol comes from the Arabic رأس الغول (raʾs al-ghūl) -- "the head of the ghoul."  The Greeks, who named the constellation in which it resides Perseus, thought that Algol was the Gorgon's head that the hero was carrying.  The ancient Hebrews called it Rōsh ha Sāṭān (Satan's head).  These are similar enough that they probably come from a common source, but the Chinese as well thought there was something evil about it; they called Algol and the stars surrounding it Dà Líng -- the Mausoleum.

So even if there's no certain evidence that the ancients knew about Algol's odd variability, it seems pretty likely.

What no one realized until recently is that Algol is weirder even than that.  To see just how strange it is, first a brief physics lesson.

Some of the great names of physics and astronomy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries -- Galileo Galilei, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton, especially -- used highly accurate data on planetary positions to conclude that the planets in the Solar System go around the Sun in elliptical orbits, all powered by the Universal Law of Gravitation.  The mathematical model they came up with worked to a high degree of accuracy, allowing earthbound astronomers to predict where the planets were in the sky, and also such phenomena as eclipses.

Lucky for them, though, that the Sun is so massive.  Because the Sun is huge -- it has a thousand times more mass than the largest planet, Jupiter -- its gravitational pull is big enough that it swamps the pull the planets exert on each other.  For most purposes, you can treat each orbit as independent two-body problems; you can (for example) look at the masses, velocities, and distances between the Sun and Saturn and ignore everything else for the time being.  (Interestingly, it's the slight deviation of the orbit of Uranus from the predictions of its position using the two-body solution that led astronomers to deduce that there must be another massive planet out there pulling on it -- and in 1846 Neptune was observed for the first time, right where the deviations suggested it would be.)

I said it was "lucky" that the mass imbalance is so large, but I haven't told you how lucky.  It turns out that all you have to do is add one more object of close to the same size, and you now have the three-body problem -- a big problem, because physicists have been unable to find a general solution to the equations it generates.  You can pick the parameters (mass, separation distance, initial velocity, and so on) and have a computer model what the orbits would look like, but there's no overarching set of mathematical equations that physicists can use on any other system with different parameters.  The unifying model just doesn't exist, or at least hasn't been discovered yet.

Worse still, most individual three-body systems generate chaotic orbits.  Here's a rather mesmerizing gif showing one of them:

[Image is licensed under the Creative Commons Dnttllthmmnm, Three-body Problem Animation with COM, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The reason this comes up  is a paper in The Astrophysical Journal showing that Algol isn't a simple double star system, with two stars orbiting their common center of gravity like Newton said.  In the 1950s astronomers figured out that the known binary system (Algol A and Algol B) is in an orbit with a third star (Algol C), with the whole trio orbiting their center of gravity once every 1.86 years, and presumably tracing out some kind of bizarre Spirograph pattern like the one in the gif.

But the recent paper showed that it's not even that simple.  Algol isn't a weird, chaotic three-star system.

The "star" we call Algol is apparently made up of at least seven stars all moving in a complex dance around their collective center of gravity.

Algol is in our stellar neighborhood -- only ninety light years away -- so why haven't they been observed until now?

"The paradox is that Algol A is 'too bright,' " said astrophysicist Lauri Jetsu, author of the paper, in an interview with Science Daily.  "It can hide these new companion candidate stars even from our most powerful modern space telescopes, just like our Sun can hide all other stars during daytime...  Even the cutting-edge equipment onboard the Gaia satellite could not detect these new companion candidates.  Future interferometric observations may be used to directly confirm the existence of at least some of Algol's companions."

I find it fascinating that even in a part of physics that is usually considered pretty well sussed-out -- classical mechanics, the study of objects in motion -- there are unsolved problems that the experts consider very close to intractable.  Further reinforcing the notion that the universe doesn't seem to feel obliged to choose how it acts based upon whether humans find it comprehensible.  It does what it does, leaving us to try to explain how on earth (or off it) that kind of thing could happen -- in this case, seven massive objects all whirling around each other in apparently stable orbits.

It's a little like the famous (if apocryphal) story about bumblebees -- that physicists have analyzed their mass, wing size, wing beat frequency, and so on, and have come to the conclusion that bumblebees can't fly.  The bumblebees, not knowing this, go ahead and fly anyway.  Here, the seven members of the Algol system are apparently unaware that the steps of their cosmic dance is beyond what our current physics can explain, but it doesn't stop them from dancing.

Think of that the next time you look at the night sky, and see the bright blue pinpoint of the ghoul's head twinkling against the blackness.

**********************************

My master's degree is in historical linguistics, with a focus on Scandinavia and Great Britain (and the interactions between them) -- so it was with great interest that I read Cat Jarman's book River Kings: A New History of Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Road.

Jarman, who is an archaeologist working for the University of Bristol and the Scandinavian Museum of Cultural History of the University of Oslo, is one of the world's experts on the Viking Age.  She does a great job of de-mythologizing these wide-traveling raiders, explorers, and merchants, taking them out of the caricature depictions of guys with blond braids and horned helmets into the reality of a complex, dynamic culture that impacted lands and people from Labrador to China.

River Kings is a brilliantly-written analysis of an often-misunderstood group -- beginning with the fact that "Viking" isn't an ethnic designation, but an occupation -- and tracing artifacts they left behind traveling between their homeland in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark to Iceland, the Hebrides, Normandy, the Silk Road, and Russia.  (In fact, the Rus -- the people who founded, and gave their name to, Russia -- were Scandinavian explorers who settled in what is now the Ukraine and western Russia, intermarrying with the Slavic population there and eventually forming a unique melded culture.)

If you are interested in the Vikings or in European history in general, you should put Jarman's book in your to-read list.  It goes a long way toward replacing the legendary status of these fierce, sea-going people with a historically-accurate reality that is just as fascinating.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Gems of dialogue

It's hard to describe why some particular lines of dialogue are memorable, any more than you could say "wow, those three notes in that symphony are brilliant!"  The dialogue itself only shows its excellence in the context that the author has set.  Nevertheless, there are passages of dialogue in books and stories that to me still stand out as absolute genius.

It's probably futile to try to explain why these particular passages leaped off the page for me, but I thought it might be a fun topic for this week's Fiction Friday to present here a few lines of dialogue that for me exemplify sheer, unadulterated brilliance in writing.  Each one of these sent a little shiver up my spine, and I thought: this is perfect.  See how many you recognize, and if you recognize them, whether you agree.  Feel free to add some of your favorites.  If nothing else, we'll all have a list of books to put on our winter reading list.

"Mother was always shoving me out into the world," Meg said.  "She'd want me to do this.  You know she would.  Tell her..." she started, choked, then held up her head and said, "No.  Never mind.  I'll tell her myself." -- Madeleine l'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time


"I am tired," he said.  "I did a lot today.  That is, I did something.  The only thing I have ever done.  I pressed a button.  It took the entire will power, the accumulated strength of my entire existence, to press one damned 'Off' button." -- Ursula LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven


"Most people are not looking for provable truths.  As you said, truth is often accompanied by intense pain, and almost no one is looking for painful truths.  What people need is beautiful, comforting stories that make them feel as if their lives have some meaning." -- Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

"This belonged to my great-granddad," the sergeant said.  "He was in the battle we had against Pseudopolis and my great-gran gave him this book of prayer for soldiers, ‘cos you need all the prayers you can get, believe you me, and he stuck it in the top pocket of his jerkin, ‘cos he couldn’t afford armour, and next day in battle - whoosh, this arrow came out of nowhere, wham, straight into this book and it went all the way through to the last page before stopping, look, you can see the hole."

"Pretty miraculous," Captain Carrot agreed.

"Yeah, it was, I s’pose," said the sergeant.  He looked ruefully at the battered volume.  "Shame about the other seventeen arrows, really." -- Terry Pratchett, Jingo

"We will have peace, " said Théoden at last thickly and with an effort.  Several of the Riders cried out gladly.  Théoden held up his hand.  "Yes, we will have peace," he said, now in a clear voice, "we will have peace, when you and all of your works have perished -- and the works of your dark master to whom you would deliver us.  You are a liar, Saruman, and a corrupter of men's hearts.  You hold out your hand to me, and I perceive only a finger of the claw of Mordor.  Cruel and cold!  Even if your war on me was just -- as it was not, for were you ten times as wise you would have no right to rule me and mine for your own profit as you desired -- even so, what will you say of your torches in Westfold and the children that lie dead there?  And they hewed Háma's body before the gates of the Hornburg, after he was dead.  When you hang from a gibbet at your window for the sport of your own crows, I will have peace with you and Orthanc.  So much for the House of Eorl.  A lesser son of great sires am I, but I do not need to lick your fingers.  Turn elsewhither.  But I fear your voice has lost its charm." -- J. R. R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

"You suggested that Hazel should tell them of our adventures, Blackberry, but it didn't go down well, did it?  Who wants to hear about brave deeds when he's ashamed of his own, and who likes an open, honest tale from someone he's deceiving?  Do you want me to go on?  I tell you, every single thing that's happened fits like a bee in a foxglove.  And kill them, you say, and help ourselves to the great burrow?  We shall help ourselves to a roof of bones, hung with shining wires.  Help ourselves to misery and death." -- Richard Adams, Watership Down


"In that face, deformed by hatred of philosophy, I saw for the first time the portrait of the Antichrist, who does not come from the tribe of Judas, as his heralds have it, or from a far country.  The Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of the truth, as the heretic is born from the saint and the possessed from the seer.  Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.  Jorge did a diabolical thing because he loved his truth so lewdly that he dared anything in order to destroy falsehood." -- Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

"I believe that I am mad," said Vertue presently.  "The world cannot be as it seems to me.  If there is something to go to, it is a bribe, and I cannot go to it; if I can go, then there is nothing to go to."

"Vertue," said John, "give in.  For once, yield to desire.  Have done with your choosing.  Want something."

"I cannot," said Vertue.  "I must choose because I choose because I choose; and it goes on forever, and in the whole world I cannot find a single reason for rising from this stone." -- C. S. Lewis, The Pilgrim's Regress


"As for my gravestone?  I would like to borrow that great barber-pole from out front of the town shoppe, and have it run at midnight if you happened to drop by my mound to say hello.  And there the old barber-pole would be, lit, its bright ribbons twining up out of mystery, turning, and twining away up into further mysteries, forever.  And if you come to visit, leave an apple for the ghosts." -- Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes


"Yes," she said coldly.  "Better that they die here and now, if that's what has to happen, than that they go with you and live.  They -- we -- did some lousy things.  But the price is much too high." -- Stephen King, Needful Things

So there are a few of my favorites.  I'd love to hear yours!

**********************************

My master's degree is in historical linguistics, with a focus on Scandinavia and Great Britain (and the interactions between them) -- so it was with great interest that I read Cat Jarman's book River Kings: A New History of Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Road.

Jarman, who is an archaeologist working for the University of Bristol and the Scandinavian Museum of Cultural History of the University of Oslo, is one of the world's experts on the Viking Age.  She does a great job of de-mythologizing these wide-traveling raiders, explorers, and merchants, taking them out of the caricature depictions of guys with blond braids and horned helmets into the reality of a complex, dynamic culture that impacted lands and people from Labrador to China.

River Kings is a brilliantly-written analysis of an often-misunderstood group -- beginning with the fact that "Viking" isn't an ethnic designation, but an occupation -- and tracing artifacts they left behind traveling between their homeland in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark to Iceland, the Hebrides, Normandy, the Silk Road, and Russia.  (In fact, the Rus -- the people who founded, and gave their name to, Russia -- were Scandinavian explorers who settled in what is now the Ukraine and western Russia, intermarrying with the Slavic population there and eventually forming a unique melded culture.)

If you are interested in the Vikings or in European history in general, you should put Jarman's book in your to-read list.  It goes a long way toward replacing the legendary status of these fierce, sea-going people with a historically-accurate reality that is just as fascinating.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Analysis of a triple-whammy

I always find it wryly amusing when I hear someone talk about the Strong Anthropic Principle -- the idea that the universe was fine-tuned by a creator to be hospitable to life, particularly human life -- because it doesn't take much of a close look to become aware of exactly how inhospitable the universe actually is.

Even here on Earth, the situation is kind of dicey.  Our planet's history is really one cataclysm after another; that our own particular lineage survived is probably more a matter of luck than anything else.  In fact, only 74,000 years ago, climate havoc caused by the eruption of the Indonesian volcano Toba is thought by some scientists to have nearly wiped out our species -- they estimate the "Toba bottleneck event" to have reduced the entire population of Homo sapiens to under ten thousand individuals.  (For reference, that means that the human population of the whole planet was about as many people as currently live in Sitka, Alaska.)  Besides major volcanic eruptions, add in earthquakes and tsunamis, global marine anoxia events, and meteor strikes, and you can see that where we live isn't nearly as hospitable as it might look at first.

So the truth lies closer to the Weak Anthropic Principle -- of course the universe, and the Earth in particular, have the conditions necessary for life to exist, because if they didn't, we wouldn't be here to consider the question.

The reason all this catastrophic stuff comes up is a paper that came out a couple of weeks ago in Nature Communications Biology.  Entitled, "Widespread Loss of Mammalian Lineage and Dietary Diversity in the Early Oligocene of Afro-Arabia," by Dorien de Vries (of the University of Salford), Steven Heritage (of Stony Brook University), and Matthew Borths, Hesham Sallam, and Erik Seiffert (of the Duke University Museum of Natural History), it looks at a little-known extinction event that was apparently the result of a one-two-three punch that nearly halted the mammalian species in Africa in their tracks.

Which, of course, also includes our own ancestors.

Some of the Eocene animal groups affected by the extinction -- the left two are primates, the upper right a hyaenodont, and the lower right a prehistoric rodent.  [Photo by Matthew Borths]

The researchers had their first clues about the magnitude of the event, which occurred on the order of thirty-three million years ago, from looking at fossilized mammal teeth from East Africa, and found that right on the boundary of the Eocene and Oligocene, the number of mammal species dropped drastically.

"In our anthropoid ancestors, diversity bottoms out to almost nothing around thirty million years ago, leaving them with a single tooth type,” said Erik Seiffert, senior co-author of the paper, in an interview with EurekAlert.  "That ancestral tooth shape determined what was possible in terms of later dietary diversification...  There's an interesting story about the role of that bottleneck in our own early evolutionary history.  We came pretty close to never existing, if our monkey-like ancestors had gone extinct thirty million years ago.  Luckily they didn’t."

What seems to have driven the extinction was a triple-whammy -- rapid cooling of the climate after the equally catastrophic Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (during which the global average temperature was eight degrees warmer than it is now), followed by the huge Chesapeake Bay meteorite collision and a near-simultaneous massive eruption of flood basalts in Ethiopia.

Diversity plummeted.  More interestingly, the extinction preferentially spared generalists -- mammals which, from their tooth morphology, apparently could eat a variety of different kinds of food.  Specialists got hit the hardest, once again reinforcing the general evolutionary concept that if the ecosystem is stable, specialization is a good thing, but during periods of rapid change, it's the generalists who come out on top.

This -- as Seiffert says, luckily for us -- left our own distant ancestors to continue loping about on the African savanna, and also knocked out a lot of the competition.  The shape and structure of our own teeth reflect that event.  "We lost a lot of diversity at the Eocene-Oligocene boundary," said study co-author Matthew Borths.  "But the species that survived apparently had enough of a toolkit to persist through this fluctuating climate."

This should be yet another cautionary note about the fragility of the Earth's suitability for humanity, not to mention our current heedless messing-about with the planetary climate and ecosystems.  It's unlikely to, of course.  We don't have a very good record of listening to scientists, even when our own survival is at stake.  Part of this is that in recent memory we haven't had to deal with planet-wide natural disasters -- it's made us cocky.

"We've always been fine before," is the general attitude.

All it takes is reading the de Vries et al. paper to realize that "always" is singularly inapt.

**********************************

My master's degree is in historical linguistics, with a focus on Scandinavia and Great Britain (and the interactions between them) -- so it was with great interest that I read Cat Jarman's book River Kings: A New History of Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Road.

Jarman, who is an archaeologist working for the University of Bristol and the Scandinavian Museum of Cultural History of the University of Oslo, is one of the world's experts on the Viking Age.  She does a great job of de-mythologizing these wide-traveling raiders, explorers, and merchants, taking them out of the caricature depictions of guys with blond braids and horned helmets into the reality of a complex, dynamic culture that impacted lands and people from Labrador to China.

River Kings is a brilliantly-written analysis of an often-misunderstood group -- beginning with the fact that "Viking" isn't an ethnic designation, but an occupation -- and tracing artifacts they left behind traveling between their homeland in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark to Iceland, the Hebrides, Normandy, the Silk Road, and Russia.  (In fact, the Rus -- the people who founded, and gave their name to, Russia -- were Scandinavian explorers who settled in what is now the Ukraine and western Russia, intermarrying with the Slavic population there and eventually forming a unique melded culture.)

If you are interested in the Vikings or in European history in general, you should put Jarman's book in your to-read list.  It goes a long way toward replacing the legendary status of these fierce, sea-going people with a historically-accurate reality that is just as fascinating.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Feats of clay

As I write this, I'm waiting for a kiln full of pottery to cool enough that I can open it.

Opening a kiln, especially after the final (glaze) firing, is a bit like Forrest Gump's box of chocolates; you never know what you're gonna get.  Even though I have about ten years of experience making pottery, it's still a crapshoot every single time, mostly because so many things can go wrong along the way.  My first pottery teacher said never to get attached to a pot until it's cool, in your hands, after the final firing, and there's a lot of truth in that.  Besides the built-in uncertainty of a complex, multi-step process that never quite works the same way twice, there's the added complication that I love to mess around with new techniques, especially new glaze combinations.

So I must admit that just about all of my failures have been my own damn fault.

Sometimes, though, things work out a great deal better than you expect.

I got into pottery on a whim.  I've never been much good at artistic pursuits -- my former students will attest to the fact that my ability to draw kind of topped out in third grade -- but my wife is a brilliant artist, and had been taking lessons in pottery for a while.  She convinced me to give it a try, and after one lesson I was hooked.  I'm still at it ten years later, even though mostly I still just think of it as playing in the mud for adults.

Then there are the (many) times it doesn't go so well.  We have turned our failures into a game called "Confusing Future Archaeologists."

I've done a lot of wheel-throwing and hand-building, and we now have a studio that is completely taken over by pottery equipment.  I must say, in all seriousness, that pottery kind of saved my sanity during the pandemic lockdown.  Having something creative to focus on was a godsend.

Working on the wheel

I have no desire to learn to be a professional potter; an amateur I am, and an amateur I shall remain.  If every once in a while I produce something I judge as worthy of keeping, that's cool, but mostly I'm just in it to have fun.

Then, there's the potential for combining pottery with my other obsessions.  Yes, I know I'm a total fanboy.  No, I don't care.

The reason this comes up is a paper I ran into a couple of days ago in The Journal of Anthropological Archaeology about the techniques for pottery-making used by the mysterious Indus Valley Civilization of northwestern India four thousand years ago.  A team led by Alessandro Ceccarelli of the University of Cambridge did a detailed analysis of fragments of pottery from the Indus Civilization, and found that they were already using a great many of the techniques potters still use today -- pinching, slab-building, coiling, and wheel-throwing.  You might wonder how the researchers could discern the latter; a well-made coiled pot and a wheel-thrown pot can look a great deal alike.  But microscopic analysis of the shards showed that even after smoothing and firing, hand-built pottery still shows traces of the scraping potters do to join the pieces together and avoid cracking, while wheel-thrown pottery retains evidence of rotational stress in the clay particles that comes from the torque on the clay from the spinning wheel and the drag exerted by the potter's hands.

When I read that last bit, I thought, "Oh, of course."  One of the things wheel-throwers learn very early on is that throwing creates a twist in the clay, even if the homogeneity of the material makes it hard to see.  Multi-part pieces like teapots are where this is the most critical; when you put the spout on a teapot, you have to account for the fact that during firing the clay will "relax" or untwist a little, so what was joined to the body of the teapot as a perfectly-aligned spout can come out of the kiln tilted to the side.  Once you figure out how much the clay you're using untwists, you compensate by putting the spout on tilted a little in the other direction -- so during the firing, the spout will right itself and come out properly aligned.

It's kind of amazing to me how far back these techniques go.  Think about the insight our distant ancestors must have had to take this common substance -- clay -- and fashion it into something not only useful, but beautiful.  Now, I sit down at an electric wheel with homogeneous store-bought clay and perfectly-formulated stains and glazes, and fire my work in an electric kiln.  (And I still have pieces that flop sometimes.)  Consider the trial-and-error that must have gone into digging and refining natural clay, developing techniques for shaping (including figuring out how to build a kick-wheel), figuring out which available minerals would work as colorants and glazes, and using pit firing to harden the clay to make the piece usable for containing food or drink.  Modern potters are the inheritors of what clay artisans have learned over millennia of attempts, innovations, successes and failures.

"This study doesn’t just look at how pottery was made – it gives us a fascinating insight into some of the earliest ‘social networks’ and how people passed on knowledge and skills over centuries without the use of books or the technology we now take for granted," Ceccarelli said, in an interview with Heritage Daily.  "The objects we examined suggested that while communities of ceramic makers lived in the same regions – and often in the same settlements – different traditions emerged and were sustained over centuries.  There was a clear effort to keep alive their unique ways of making pottery to set them apart from other communities, like a statement of their identity."

All of which makes me wonder what those future archaeologists will think about my pile of smashed pottery.

But now, I need to wrap this up, and go check the kiln.  I swear, waiting for it to cool is like a kid waiting for Christmas.  And hoping that the brightly-colored boxes under the tree contain something better than socks, underwear, or an ugly sweater.

**********************************

My master's degree is in historical linguistics, with a focus on Scandinavia and Great Britain (and the interactions between them) -- so it was with great interest that I read Cat Jarman's book River Kings: A New History of Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Road.

Jarman, who is an archaeologist working for the University of Bristol and the Scandinavian Museum of Cultural History of the University of Oslo, is one of the world's experts on the Viking Age.  She does a great job of de-mythologizing these wide-traveling raiders, explorers, and merchants, taking them out of the caricature depictions of guys with blond braids and horned helmets into the reality of a complex, dynamic culture that impacted lands and people from Labrador to China.

River Kings is a brilliantly-written analysis of an often-misunderstood group -- beginning with the fact that "Viking" isn't an ethnic designation, but an occupation -- and tracing artifacts they left behind traveling between their homeland in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark to Iceland, the Hebrides, Normandy, the Silk Road, and Russia.  (In fact, the Rus -- the people who founded, and gave their name to, Russia -- were Scandinavian explorers who settled in what is now the Ukraine and western Russia, intermarrying with the Slavic population there and eventually forming a unique melded culture.)

If you are interested in the Vikings or in European history in general, you should put Jarman's book in your to-read list.  It goes a long way toward replacing the legendary status of these fierce, sea-going people with a historically-accurate reality that is just as fascinating.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]