The will to fight

If you're fortunate enough not to suffer from crippling depression and anxiety, let me give you a picture of what it's like.

Last week I started an online class focused on how to use TikTok as a way for authors to promote their books.  So I got the app and created an account -- it's not a social media platform I'd used before -- and made my first short intro video.  I was actually kind of excited, because it seemed like it could be fun, and heaven knows I need some help in the self-promotion department.  (As an aside, if you're on TikTok and would like to follow me, here's the link to my page.)

Unfortunately, it seemed like as soon as I signed up, I started having technical problems.  I couldn't do the very first assignment because my account was apparently disabled, and that (very simple) function was unavailable.  Day two, I couldn't do the assignment because I lacked a piece of equipment I needed.  (That one was my fault; I thought it was on the "optional accessories" list, but I was remembering wrong.)  Day three's assignment -- same as day one; another function was blocked for my account.  By now, I was getting ridiculously frustrated, watching all my classmates post their successful assignments while I was completely stalled, and told my wife I was ready to give up.  I was getting ugly flashbacks of being in college physics and math classes, where everyone else seemed to be getting it with ease, and I was totally at sea.  When the same damn thing happened on day four, my wife (who is very much a "we can fix this" type and also a techno-whiz), said, "Let me take a look."  After a couple of hours of jiggering around with the settings, she seemed to have fixed the problem, and all the functions I'd been lacking were restored.

The next morning, when I got up and got my cup of coffee and thought, "Okay, let me see if I can get started catching up," I opened the app and it immediately crashed.

Tried it again.  Crash.  Uninstalled and reinstalled the app.  Crash.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons LaurMG., Frustrated man at a desk (cropped), CC BY-SA 3.0]

I think anyone would be frustrated at this point, but my internal voices were screaming, "GIVE UP.  YOU SHOULD NEVER HAVE SIGNED UP FOR THIS.  YOU CAN'T DO IT.  IT FIGURES.  LOSER."  And over and over, like a litany, "Why bother.  Why bother with anything."  Instead of the frustration spurring me to look for a solution, it triggered my brain to go into overdrive demanding that I give up and never try again.

When I heard my wife's alarm go off an hour later, I went and told her what had happened, trying not to frame it the way I wanted to, which was "... so fuck everything."  She sleepily said, "Have you tried turning your phone completely off, then turning it back on?"  Ah, yes, the classic go-to for computer problems, and it hadn't occurred to me.  So I did...

... and the app sprang back to life.

But now I was on day five of a ten-day course, and already four assignments behind.  That's when the paralyzing anxiety kicked in.  I had told the instructors of the course a little about my tech woes, and I already felt like I had been an unmitigated pest, so the natural course of action -- thinking, "you paid for this course, tell the instructors and see if they can help you catch up" -- filled me with dread.  I hate being The Guy Who Needs Special Help.  I just want to do my assignments, keep my head down, fly under the radar, be the reliable work-horse who gets stuff done.  And here I was -- seemingly the only one in the class who was being thwarted by mysterious forces at every turn.

So I never asked.  The more help I needed, the more invisible I became.  It's now day seven, and I'm maybe halfway caught up, and I still can't bring myself to tell them the full story of what was going on.

Adversity > freak out and give up.  Then blame yourself and decide you should never try anything new ever again.  That's depression and anxiety.

I've had this reaction pretty much all my life, and it's absolutely miserable.  It most definitely isn't what I was accused of over and over as a child -- that I was choosing to be this way to "get attention" or to "make people feel sorry for me."  Why the fuck would anyone choose to live like this?  All I wanted as a kid -- all I still want, honestly -- is to be normal, not to have my damn brain sabotage me any time the slightest thing goes wrong.  As I told my wife -- who, as you might imagine, has the patience of a saint -- "some days I would give every cent I have to get a brain transplant."

So re: TikTok, if Carol hadn't been there, I'd have deleted my account and forfeited the tuition for the class.  But I'm happy to report that I haven't given up, and I've posted a few hopefully mildly entertaining videos, which I encourage you to peruse.

The reason all this comes up, though, isn't just because of my social media woes.  I decided to write about this because of some research published this week in the journal Translational Psychiatry which found that a single gene -- called Tob -- seems to mediate resilience to emotional stress in mice, and without it, produces exactly the "freak out and give up" response people have when they suffer from depression and anxiety.

Tob was already the subject of intense research because it apparently plays a role in the regulation of the cell cycle, cancer suppression, and the immune system.  It's known that in high-stress situations, Tob rapidly switches on, so it is involved somehow in the flight-fight-freeze response.  And a team led by Tadashi Yamamoto of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology found that "Tob-knockout mice" -- mice that have been genetically engineered to lack the Tob gene -- simply gave up when they were in stressful situations requiring resilience and sustained effort.  Put another way, without Tob, they completely lost the will to fight. 

When I read this article -- which I came across while I was in the midst of my struggle with technology -- I immediately thought, "Good heavens, that's me."  Could my tendency to become frustrated and overwhelmed easily, and then give up in despair, be due to the underactivity of a gene?  I know that depression and anxiety run in my family; my mother and maternal grandmother definitely struggled with them, as does my elder son.  Of course, it's hard to tease apart the nature/nurture effects in this kind of situation.  It's a reasonable surmise that being raised around anxious, stressed people would make a kid anxious and stressed.

But it also makes a great deal of sense that these familial patterns of mental illness could be because there's a faulty gene involved.

Research like Yamamoto et al. is actually encouraging; identifying a genetic underpinning to mental illnesses like the one I have suffered from my entire life opens up a possible target for treatment.  Because believe me, I wouldn't wish this on anyone.  While fighting with a silly social media platform might seem to someone who isn't mentally ill like a shrug-inducing, "it's no big deal, why are you getting so upset?" situation, for people like me, everything is a big deal.  I've always envied people who seem to be able to let things roll off them; whatever the reason, if it came from the environment I grew up in or because I have a defective Tob gene, I've never been able to do that.  Fortunately, my family and friends are loving and supportive and understand what I go through sometimes, and are there to help.

But wouldn't it be wonderful if this kind of thing could be fixed permanently?

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Rebuilding the web

One of the (many) ways people can be shortsighted is in their seeming determination to view non-human species as inconsequential except insofar as they have a direct benefit to humans.

The truth, of course, is a great deal more nuanced than that.  One well-studied example is the reintroduction of gray wolves to Yellowstone National Park, something that was opposed by ranchers who owned land adjacent to the park, hunters who were concerned that wolves would reduce numbers of deer, elk, and moose for hunting, and people worried that wolves might attack humans visiting the park or the area surrounding it.  The latter, especially, is ridiculous; between 2002 and 2020 there were 489 verified wolf/human attacks worldwide, of which a little over three-quarters occurred because the animal was rabid.  Only eight were fatal.  The study, carried out by scientists at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, stated outright that the risks associated with a wolf attacking a human were "non-zero, but far too low to calculate."

Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed, and the wolf reintroduction went forward as scheduled, starting in 1996.  The results were nothing short of spectacular.  Elk populations had skyrocketed following the destruction of the pre-existing wolf population in the early twentieth century, resulting in such high overgrazing that willows and aspens were virtually eradicated from the park.  This caused the beaver population to plummet, as well as several species of songbirds that depend on the insects hosted by those trees.  The drop in the number of beaver colonies meant less damming of streams, resulting in small creeks drying up completely in summer and a resultant crash of fish populations.

In the years since wolves were reintroduced, all of that has reversed.  Elk populations have returned to stable numbers (and far fewer die of starvation in the winter).  Aspen and willow groves have come back, along with the beavers and songbirds that depend on them.  The ponds and wetlands are rebuilding, and the fish that declined so precipitously have begun to rebound.

All of which illustrates the truth of the famous quote by naturalist John Muir: "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."

The reason this all comes up is a recent story in Science News about a project that should give you hope; the restoration of mangrove forests in Kenya.  You probably know that mangroves are a group of trees that form impenetrable thickets along coastlines.  They've been eradicated in a lot of places -- particularly stretches of coast with sandy shores potentially attractive to tourists -- resulting in increased erosion and drastically increased damage potential from hurricanes.  A 2020 study found that having an intact mangrove buffer zone along a coast decreased the damage to human settlements and agricultural land from a direct hurricane strike by an average of 24%.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NOAA]

The Kenyan project, however, was driven by two other benefits of mangrove preservation and reintroduction -- carbon sequestration and increased fish yields.  Mangrove swamps have been shown to be four times better at carbon capture and storage as inland forests, and their tangled submerged root systems are havens for hatchling fish and the plankton they eat.  The restoration has been successful enough that similar projects have been launched in Mozambique and Madagascar.  A UN-funded project called Mikoko Pamoja allows communities that are involved in mangrove restoration to receive money for "carbon credits" that then can be reinvested into the community infrastructure -- with the result that the towns of Gazi and Makongeni, nearest to the mangrove swamps and responsible for their protection, have become economically self-sufficient.

I have the feeling that small, locally-run projects like Mikoko Pamoja will be how we'll save our global ecosystem -- and, most importantly, realizing that species having no immediately obvious direct benefit to humans (like wolves and mangroves) are nevertheless critical for maintaining the health of the complex, interlocked web of life we all depend on.  It means taking our blinders off, and understanding that our everyday actions do have an impact.  I'll end with a quote from one of my heroes, the late Kenyan activist Wangari Maathai: "In order to accomplish anything," she said, "we must keep our feelings of empowerment ahead of our feelings of despair.  We cannot do everything, but still there are many things we can do."

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Viral reality

If you are of the opinion that more evidence is necessary for demonstrating the correctness of the evolutionary model, I give you: a paper by biologist Justin R. Meyer of the University of California-San Diego et al. that has conclusively demonstrated speciation occurring in the laboratory.

The gist of what the team did is to grow populations of bacteriophage Lambda (a virus that attacks and kills bacteria) in the presence of populations of two different potential food sources, more specifically E. coli that had one of two different receptors where the virus could attach.  What happened was that the original bacteriophages were non-specialists -- they could attach to either receptor, but not very efficiently -- but over time, more of them accrued mutations that allowed them to specialize in attacking one receptor over the other.  Ultimately, the non-specialists became extinct, leaving a split population where each new species could not survive on the other's food source.

Diagram of a bacteriophage [Image is in the Public Domain]

Pretty amazing stuff.  My response was, "If that isn't evolution, what the hell is it?"  Of course, I'm expecting the litany of goofy rejoinders to start any time now.  "It's only microevolution."  "There was no novel gene produced."  "But both of them are still viruses.  If you showed me a virus evolving into a wombat, then I'd believe you."

Nevertheless, this sticks another nail in the coffin of the anti-evolutionists -- both Intelligent Design proponents and the young-Earth creationists, the latter of whom believe that all of the Earth's species were created as-is six thousand or so years ago along with the Earth itself, and that the two hundred million year old trilobite fossils one sometimes finds simply dropped out of God's pocket while he was walking through the Garden of Eden or something.

So as usual, you can't logic your way out of a stance you didn't logic your way into.  Still, I have hope that the tide is gradually turning.  Certainly one cheering incident comes our way from Richard Lenski, who is justly famous for his groundbreaking study of evolution in bacteria and who co-authored the Meyer paper I began with.  But Lenski will forever be one of my heroes for the way he handled Andrew Schlafly, who runs Conservapedia, a Wikipedia knockoff that attempts to remodel the world so that all of the ultra-conservative talking points are true.  Schlafly had written a dismissive piece about Lenski's work on Conservapedia, to which Lenski responded.  The ensuing exchange resulted in one of the most epic smackdowns by a scientist I've ever seen.  Lenski takes apart Schlafly's objections piece by piece, citing data, kicking ass, and taking names.  I excerpt the end of it below, but you can (and should) read the whole thing at the article on the "Lenski Affair" over at RationalWiki:

I know that I’ve been a bit less polite in this response than in my previous one, but I’m still behaving far more politely than you deserve given your rude, willfully ignorant, and slanderous behavior.  And I’ve spent far more time responding than you deserve.  However, as I said at the outset, I take education seriously, and I know some of your acolytes still have the ability and desire to think, as do many others who will read this exchange.

Sincerely, Richard Lenski

And if that's not spectacular enough, check out one of the four P.S.s:

I noticed that you say that one of your favorite articles on your website is the one on “Deceit.”  That article begins as follows: “Deceit is the deliberate distortion or denial of the truth with an intent to trick or fool another.  Christianity and Judaism teach that deceit is wrong.  For example, the Old Testament says, ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.’”  You really should think more carefully about what that commandment means before you go around bearing false witness against others.

I can only hope that there was a mic around after that so that Lenski could drop it.

So there you have it.  Science finding out cool stuff once again, because after all, that's what science does.  The creationists, it is to be hoped, retreating further and further into the corner into which they've painted themselves.  It's probably a forlorn wish that this'll make Ken Ham et al. shut up, but maybe they'll eventually have to adapt their strategy to address reality instead of avoiding it.

You might even say... they'll need to evolve.

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Big bird

If last week's post about the Demon Ducks of Australia wasn't sufficient to scare you into stopping your project to build a working time machine so you can study prehistoric life first-hand, take a look at a different recent fossil discovery -- this one of a bird with a six-meter wingspan...

... and teeth.

Well, pseudoteeth, says the Wikipedia article on pelagornithids, because they don't have the same structure as true teeth and are actually outgrowths of the premaxillary and mandibular bones.  But that would have been little consolation to their prey:

This rather horrifying discovery, which I found out about thanks to a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, lived in Antarctica on the order of fifty million years ago.  The entire order was around for a very long time -- they first evolved shortly after the Cretaceous Extinction 66 million years ago, and only went extinct at the end of the Pliocene Epoch, three million years ago.  So these enormous toothed birds (pardon me, pseudotoothed birds) were swooping around scaring the absolute shit out of everyone for about sixty times longer than humans have even existed.

"In a lifestyle likely similar to living albatrosses, the giant extinct pelagornithids, with their very long-pointed wings, would have flown widely over the ancient open seas, which had yet to be dominated by whales and seals, in search of squid, fish and other seafood to catch with their beaks lined with sharp pseudoteeth," said Thomas Stidham of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who co-authored the study.  "The big ones are nearly twice the size of albatrosses, and these bony-toothed birds would have been formidable predators that evolved to be at the top of their ecosystem."

It's easy to look around at today's chickadees and warblers and think of birds as being small, feathery, fluttering creatures who are more often prey than predator.  But even today we have, as a reminder that birds are dinosaurs, species like cassowaries:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nevit Dilmen, Darica Cassowary 00974, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Which are as foul-tempered as their expression suggests, and have been known to attack people by kicking them with their heavy, razor-taloned feet.  So it's not just the prehistoric birds that have as their motto, "Do not fuck with me."

Anyhow, that's today's installment from the "Be Glad You Live When And Where You Do" department.  As fascinating as I find prehistoric life and birds in particular, I'd prefer not to meet in person a bird that could carry me away and eat me for breakfast.  

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Swamp people

I've written here at Skeptophilia for twelve years, and I've been interested in weird claims since I was a teenager, so it's not often that I run into a cryptid I'd never heard of.

Much less one from my home state of Louisiana.

So I was pretty shocked when a loyal reader sent me an article on the "Honey Island Swamp Monster," a southern relative of Sasquatch (and thus a cousin of Arkansas's Fouke Monster and southern Florida's Skunk Ape), who allegedly haunts the swamps along the Pearl River in Saint Tammany Parish.

Unlike a lot of cryptids, though, the Honey Island Swamp Monster doesn't have a long history.  The first reported sighting was by a retired air traffic controller named Harlan Ford in 1963.  Since then, the crypto-crowd has seized upon the story as they always tend to do, and the Monster has made appearances on shows like Mysteries and Monsters in America wherein they search every week for some strange beast, and every week find exactly zero beasts, then high-five each other for being such amazing beast hunters and do the same thing next week.

Oh, and if you're ever in Saint Tammany Parish, apparently there are Honey Island Swamp Monster Tours wherein a guide will take you out into the swamp, and you'll come back having had the thrilling experience of seeing no monsters while getting approximately 8,382,017 mosquito bites.  (I will say, however, that the Louisiana swamps are beautiful even without monsters.  I have great memories of growing up fishing, boating, birdwatching, and swimming -- yes, with the alligators and cottonmouths and all -- in the Atchafalaya Basin Swamp of south central Louisiana.)

But as far as the Honey Island Swamp Monster goes, the sad truth is that when you start doing a little digging, the whole story starts to fall apart pretty quickly.  On cryptid sites there's a lot of buzz about some camera film found amongst Harlan Ford's belongings after his death in 1980, claiming that it had photographs of the Monster.  But I found actual images of the developed film, and... here they are:

To say this is underwhelming falls considerably short.  It further supports my contention that there's something about aiming a camera at a cryptid that causes the AutoBlur function to turn on.

More damning still, though, is something rationalist skeptic and paranormal investigator Joe Nickell uncovered back in 2011.  He was looking into the stories of the Honey Island Swamp Monster, and specifically Harlan Ford's role in perpetuating them, and he found, buried near Ford's former hunting camp on the Pearl River, one of a pair of shoes with an altered sole for making Swamp Monster tracks.

Oops.

Nickell calls this "prima facie evidence of hoaxing."  And I have to admit that if he were alive, Ford would have a lot of 'splainin' to do.  As do his apologists, such as his granddaughter Dana Holyfield-Evans, who still support his claims, especially when it involves television appearances on shows like Not Finding Bigfoot on the Folks, This Seriously Isn't About History Anymore channel.

So sad to say -- because, as I've pointed out before, as a biologist, no one would be happier than me if it turned out there really was a Bigfoot lurching around in the wilderness somewhere -- this one is kind of a non-starter.  Anyhow, you cryptid hunters, do keep looking.  Just because one story turned out to be false, doesn't mean they're all false, right?  Even if the last 562 stories were false, same thing, right?

Of course, right.

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Confidence boost

New from the "Well, I Coulda Told You That" department, we have: a study out of MIT showing that confident kids do better in mathematics -- and that confidence instilled in childhood persists into adulthood, with positive outcomes in higher education, employment, and income.

The study appeared in the Journal of Human Resources, and tracked children from eighth grade onward.  It looked at measures of their confidence in their own knowledge and ability, correlated those assessments against their performance in math, and then studied their paths later on in education and eventual employment.  Controlled for a variety of factors, confidence was the best predictor of success.

What's interesting is that their confidence didn't even have to be that accurate to generate positive outcomes.  Overconfident kids had a much better track record than kids who were underconfident by the same amount.  Put a different way, it's better to think you're pretty good at something that you're not than to think you're pretty bad at something that you're not.

I can speak to this from my own experience.  I've had confidence issues all my life, largely stemming from a naturally risk-averse personality together with a mom who (for reasons I am yet to understand) discouraged me from trying things over and over.  I wanted to try martial arts as a teenager; her comment was "you'd quit after three weeks."  I had natural talent at music -- one of the talents I can truly say I was born with -- and asked to take piano lessons.  My mom said, "Why put all that money and time into something for no practical reason?"  I loved (and love) plants and the outdoors, and wanted to apply for a job at a local nursery run by some friends of my dad's.  She said, "That's way more hard, heavy, sweaty work than you'll want to do."

So in the end I did none of those things, at least not until (a lot) later in life.

A great deal of attention has been given to "helicopter parents," who monitor their kids' every move, and heaven knows as a teacher I saw enough of that, as well.  I remember one parent in particular who, if I entered a low grade into my online gradebook (which the parents had access to), I could almost set a timer for how long it'd take me to get an email asking why he'd gotten a low score.  (It usually was under thirty minutes.)  To me, this is just another way of telling kids you have no confidence in them.  It says -- perhaps not as explicitly as my mom did, but says it just the same -- "I don't think you can do this on my own.  Here, let me hold your hand."

Humans are social primates, and we are really sensitive to what others think and say.  Coincidentally, just yesterday I saw the following post, about encouragement in the realm of writing:

Now, let me put out there that this doesn't mean telling people that bad work is good or that incorrect answers are correct.  It is most definitely not the "Everyone Gets A Prize" mentality.  What it amounts to is giving people feedback that encourages, not destroys.  It's saying that anyone can succeed -- while being honest that success might entail a great deal more hard work for some than for others.  And for the person him/herself, it's not saying "I'm better than all of you" -- it's saying, "I know I've got what it takes to achieve my dreams."

Confidence is empowering, energizing, and sexy.  And I say that as someone who is still hesitant, overcautious, self-effacing, and plagued with doubt.  I all too often go into an endeavor -- starting a new book, entering a race, trying a new style of sculpture -- and immediately my mind goes into overdrive with self-sabotage.  "This'll be the time I fail completely.  Probably better not to try."

So it's a work in progress.  But let's all commit to helping each other, okay?  Support your friends and family in achieving what they're passionate about.  Find ways to help them succeed -- not only honest feedback, but simply boosting their confidence in themselves, that whatever difficulties they're currently facing, they can overcome them. 

After all, isn't it more enjoyable to say "see, I toldja so" to someone when they succeed brilliantly than when they fail?

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Peculiarities of the past

When most of us think of prehistoric animals, the first thing that comes to mind are dinosaurs.  Second, perhaps, are the Ice-Age megafauna like mammoths and giant ground sloths.  I've always found the odd, obscure ones more compelling somehow, and when I go to the Museum of Natural History in New York City, and the Smithsonian in Washington D.C., I always spend way more time with strange and less-familiar curiosities like the bizarre creatures of the Ediacaran Assemblage (sometimes known as the "Cambrian explosion fauna") and the scurrying little multituberculates, superficially rodent-like mammals that once were the most diverse and common mammalian group, went completely extinct for unknown reasons about thirty million years ago, and which aren't closely related to any living species.

The reason this comes up is three separate scientific papers that came out last week, each about a different paleontological discovery that shows us just how different life was back in the distant past.  The first, and oldest, was made on the Isle of Skye, and dates to the middle Jurassic Period, about 166 million years ago.  The fossil is of an animal called Marmorerpeton, and it represents the earliest salamander species ever discovered in Europe.

Marmorerpeton was a heavy-bodied animal was a wide, flat, frog-like head, and according to the research team that studied it, has salamander-like features but isn't closely related to extant groups of salamanders.  

[Reconstruction of Marmorerpeton by artist Brennan Stokkermans]

The second study looks at a mammal called Pantolambda bathmodon, a sheep-sized, stocky species nicknamed ManBearPig (a nod to the South Park episode of that name) that lived 62 million years ago -- making it one of the first relatively large species to evolve after the catastrophic Cretaceous Extinction took out nearly every animal species on Earth larger than a cat.  Pantolambda belonged to a mysterious order named Cimolesta, which is still being argued about not only for how it fits in with other mammals, but whether it gave rise to any living descendants -- some have suggested they were the ancestors of pangolins, others that they gave rise to early carnivores, but many paleontologists believe that Cimolesta went completely extinct.

Pantolambda bathmodon [Reconstruction by artist H. Sharpe]

The current study looks at an analysis of the annual growth lines the Pantolamba teeth, and found that they grew fast -- one possible reason why they rose to dominance so quickly, only four million years after the devastation of the asteroid strike.  Interestingly, the fossils studied were found in the San Juan Basin in New Mexico, an area that would have been flash-fried minutes after the impact -- so it's doubly amazing that a large species would have shown up so quickly.

As Ian Malcolm famously put it, "Life... uh... finds a way."

The last, and most recent, discovery comes from the Lower Omo Valley in Ethiopia, and shows that between two and six million years ago, there were prehistoric otters living there -- otters the size of lions.

Enhydriodon omoensis looked very otter-like, but grew to be two meters from tip to tail, and topped the scales at two hundred kilograms.  Isotopic analysis of the teeth indicates that it wasn't an aquatic species, but was largely a terrestrial carnivore.

And it lived at the same place and time as our ancestors the australopithecenes.  How scary is that?  I think otters are adorable, but a lion-sized otter that can eat you is not exactly what you might call cute.

Size comparison (left to right) -- modern human, australopithecene, South American giant otter, sea otter, African otter.  Enhydriodon is in the background.  Looking at you hungrily.  [Image courtesy of Sabine Riffaut / Camille Grohé / Palevoprim / CNRS – Université de Poitiers]

So that's our look at prehistoric life for today -- ancient salamanders, ManBearPigs, and enormous, people-eating otters.  As much as I'd love to see some of these weird creatures first-hand, it does make me kind of glad to live when and where I do.  I'm just as happy not taking my life into my own hands every time I step outside my front door, when the salamanders are (mostly) small enough to pick up, there's no sheep-sized ManBearPig, and the otters are little and cute.  We students of the past might sometimes wish for a time machine, but it's an open question of how long we'd last if we actually got to use one.

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