*ding* You've got mail!

It's inevitable that as Skeptophilia has grown in popularity, it's also attracted some attention of the less-positive sort.

Let me say up front that I appreciate most of the comments I get, even the ones that disagree with me.  As I pointed out to one person who took exception to something I posted -- and then apologized for appearing negative -- I wouldn't be much of a skeptic if I didn't admit it when I was wrong, had incomplete information, or was simply ignorant about a topic, so there was no need to apologize for taking me to task for it.  (And in point of fact, after my discussion with the person in question, I decided I was far enough off base that I went back and deleted the post.)

But all you have to do is look at the comments section of pretty much any example of online media to find out that there's a whole other side of this phenomenon.

So for your entertainment, today I'd like to present to you a sampling of some recent-ish comments I've gotten on posts, and a short response to each from me.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons RRZEicons, Mailbox, CC BY-SA 3.0]

1.  After a post in which I scoffed at the idea that some lady in Romania had somehow taken a photograph of her dead grandma in hell:

You're laughing now, but you won't be once you're dead yourself and join the damned in hell.

Well, you're right insofar as I won't be laughing after I'm dead.  If dead people laughed, it would give a whole different vibe to your typical funeral.  (On the other hand, it'd still be better than what happened at Mr. Redpath's poor Grandmama's funeral in the Doctor Who episode "The Unquiet Dead.")  As far as where my eternal soul -- presuming I actually have one -- will end up once I've shuffled off this mortal coil, there are a lot of other options various religions have dreamed up besides the Christian heaven and hell, so maybe there'll be choices.  As I've mentioned before, my personal favorite is Valhalla.  This might necessitate my having a Viking funeral, which I think would be kind of cool, but I'm not sure my wife will go for it.

2.  After a post on alternative medicine:

I hate closed-minded idiots like you.  I hope Big Pharma is paying you well.

I wish Big Pharma was paying me at all.  They're way behind on sending out their Shill Checks, and I'm hoping they get their asses in gear soon because at the moment I'm making one-eighth of bugger-all as a novelist.

3.  A response to a post, I've forgotten which, because it could be pretty much any of them:

You sure do swear a lot.

Fuckin' right I do.  My mom, who was a complete prude, tried her best to cure me of it, saying stuff like "People use bad words only if their vocabulary is so poor they don't know any appropriate ones."  With the wisdom of age, I've come to the conclusion that there's nothing whatsoever wrong with my vocabulary, and if an off-color word is the right one for the occasion, I'm damn well going to use it.  In any case, if the occasional swear word makes your eyes cross, you're not going to have much fun here at Skeptophilia.

4.  In response to a post I did about musical taste:

The fact that you sing the praises of Ralph Vaughan Williams tells me everything I need to know about the depth of your knowledge of classical music.  He's the favorite composer of shallow pseudo-intellectuals.

Opinion (n.) /əˈpɪn·yən/ -- a judgment about something or someone based upon personal experience and belief rather than universal or provable facts.

5.  After one of my recent posts criticizing Donald Trump -- I forget which, because once again, there are a bunch to choose from:

Trump is the president.  He won, and you libtards better get used to it.

I know he won, because it's why I had to renew my Xanax prescription last week.  As far as getting used to it -- I think everyone in this country is going to have to get used to a lot of things, including higher food prices, internment camps and deportations, cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, elimination of VA health care benefits, loss of access to vaccines, and amoral plutocrats in charge of everything.  To name a few.

But by all means, don't let me stop you from celebrating while you've still got reason to.

6.  After a post about an ultra-Christian preacher who thinks that masturbation summons "sex demons:"

I don't get on social media to read filth like this.

Then... um... don't read it?  No one's forcing you to read anything.  This reminds me of the old story about the woman who called the police because she could see out of her back window that some teenage boys were skinnydipping in the nearby river.  So the police came, and (showing admirable restraint) told the boys to go swim somewhere else.  Well, an hour later, the police got a second call from her with the same complaint.

The police said, "So, you can still see the boys through your window?"

And the woman said, "No, but I can if I climb up on my roof and look through my binoculars."

7.  After a post about hoaxes and conspiracies in which I mentioned that my all-time favorite book was Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum:

Ooh, well, aren't you just the most sophisticated scholar in the room.  Reading Eco is the modern equivalent of pretending you actually enjoy James Joyce.

Well, given that I'm the only person in the room at the moment, I'm the most sophisticated scholar here kind of by default.  The only other vaguely sentient being in my office is my puppy Jethro, who is a lovely little dog but (and I mean this in the kindest possible way) has the IQ of a peach pit.  But leaving that aside, allow me to correct an apparent misapprehension on your part.  I hate posturing and conceit as much as you seem to, and if I didn't like Foucault's Pendulum I certainly wouldn't have felt inclined to say I did out of some misguided sense that it would impress people.  And as far as your not liking Eco, I'll simply refer you to the definition of "opinion" I posted earlier.

Anyhow, those are a few selections from the mailbag.  Following Irish writer Brendan Behan's observation that "there's no such thing as bad publicity," I'd say, keep those cards and letters comin'.  I certainly can't stop people from responding negatively to what I post, and then indignantly informing me of the fact, but I can then save up their responses for a subsequent post.

Consider yourself forewarned.

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

Dangerous reflection

Last week I ran across an article in the journal Science about our capacity for creating "mirror life," and the risks thereof.  I considered addressing the topic here, but after some thought concluded that the human race has more pressing things to worry about at the moment, such as climate change, global pandemics, terrorism, environmental collapse, and Donald Trump opening the Seventh Seal of the Apocalypse because he thought it was a can of Pepsi, so I decided against it.

Since then I've been sent the article (or various summaries and commentaries) four times, along with the questions "can you tell me more about this?" and "should I be freaking out right now?"  So I guess there's enough interest (and concern) over this that it's worth a post.

The answer to the second question, at least, is "No, not yet;" and as for the first, here goes.

The issue has to do with a property of a great many organic molecules called chirality.  Chirality is like the handedness of a pair of gloves; no matter how you flip or turn a left-handed glove, it's not going to fit on your right hand.  It's made of the same parts, but put together in such a way that it can't be rotated or translated to coincide with its opposite.  Pairs of molecules like that are called enantiomers or optical isomers (the latter because crystals made of them rotate polarized light in opposite directions).

A left-handed and right-handed enantiomer of an amino acid [Image is the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]

The key point here is that on Earth, living things generally can only synthesize and metabolize one form of chiral molecules; our amino acids are all left-handed, while our sugars (including the ones in the backbones of DNA and RNA) are right-handed.  Given a diet of food made of right-handed amino acids and left-handed sugars, we'd probably not notice a difference in taste or texture -- but since our enzymes are all evolved to deal with a particular handedness, the food wouldn't be metabolizable.

In short, we'd starve to death.

The article in Science deals with the fact that biochemists have been working to find out if it's possible to create "mirror life" -- organisms constructed of molecules with the opposite handedness as our own.  And this is what has some people concerned.  The authors write:

Driven by curiosity and plausible applications, some researchers had begun work toward creating lifeforms composed entirely of mirror-image biological molecules.  Such mirror organisms would constitute a radical departure from known life, and their creation warrants careful consideration.  The capability to create mirror life is likely at least a decade away and would require large investments and major technical advances; we thus have an opportunity to consider and preempt risks before they are realized.  Here, we draw on an in-depth analysis of current technical barriers, how they might be eroded by technological progress, and what we deem to be unprecedented and largely overlooked risks.  We call for broader discussion among the global research community, policy-makers, research funders, industry, civil society, and the public to chart an appropriate path forward.

The main concern is that if these mirror organisms were somehow to escape from the lab, we wouldn't have much of a way to fight back.  Both antibodies and antibiotics are chiral as well, and likely wouldn't recognize and bind to organisms whose cell surfaces were made of molecules with the opposite handedness.  Any of these synthetic organisms that did turn out to be pathogenic would require a whole different suite of medications, and our own bodily defenses would likely be relatively useless against them.

But.

Here's the thing.  If the scientists do succeed in creating mirror life, and it does escape, the most likely result would be... nothing.  Mirror life would itself need food, and of the proper handedness for its own enzymes; and given that everything in the environment has the same left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars that we do, these synthetic life forms would have nothing to eat.  The only possible problem would be if the scientists created a mirror autotroph -- something capable of synthesizing its own nutrients, like cyanobacteria, algae, or plants.  Then, it could be a problem, from the standpoint that like exotic invasives, it would have no natural predators and might outcompete other organisms in its environment.

The other concern, though, is the "life finds a way" thing.  A mutation allowing one of these synthetic organisms to metabolize proteins or sugars of the opposite handedness from their own (or both of them) would be at a distinct advantage; if we created one of those, and it escaped, we might well be fucked.  The thing is, from what we know of biochemistry, that's an extremely rare adaptation.  I only know of one organism -- a rather obscure plant pathogen called Burkholderia caryophyllii -- that has an enzyme called D-threo-aldose 1-dehydrogenase that allows it to oxidize left-handed glucose.  

But unless you're a carnation, Burkholderia isn't a threat.

So that's an awful lot of ifs.  Thus my response that you don't have anything pressing to worry about from this research.

Now, mind you, I'm all for being careful, and I mean no criticisms of the scientists who are advising cautious consideration.  We have a rather abysmal track record of launching into stuff without thinking about the consequences.  But as far as whether we ordinary laypeople need to be worried about some synthetic mirror-image pathogen attacking next Tuesday and reducing us all to little quivering blobs of goo, I'd say no.

On the other hand, I'm the guy who told his AP Biology students in January of 1997 that "adult tissue cloning is at least ten years away," exactly one month before the announcement about Dolly the Sheep.  So maybe any predictions I make should be taken with a grain of salt.

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

A linguistic labyrinth

It's funny the rabbit holes fiction writers get dragged down sometimes.

This latest one occurred because of two things that happened kind of at the same time.  First, I was chatting with a friend about one of my books, a fall-of-civilization novel called In the Midst of Lions that in the current national and global situation is seeming to cut a little close to the bone.  In the story, one of the characters is a linguist who saw what was coming, and wrote a conlang -- a constructed (invented) language -- so he could communicate with people he trusted without it being decipherable by enemies.

My friend asked how I managed to develop the conlang, which is called Kalila, and what process I'd gone through to make it sound like a real language.

Following in the footsteps of the Star Trek folks with Klingon and J. R. R. Tolkien with Quenya and Sindarin (two of the languages of the Elves) was not an easy task.  My MA is in linguistics (yes, I know, I spent my career teaching biology; it's a long story) so I know a good bit about language structure, and I wanted to make the language different enough from the familiar Indo-European languages to seem (1) an authentic language, not just a word-for-word substitution, and (2) something a smart linguist would think up.  Unfortunately, my specialty is Indo-European languages, specifically Scandinavian languages.  (My wife gives me grief about having studied Old Norse.  My response is that if the Vikings ever take over the shipping industry, I'm gonna have the last laugh.)

A sample of Tolkien's lovely Quenya script [Image is in the Public Domain]

So I started out with a pair of blinders on.  There are a lot of rules specific to Indo-European languages that we tend to take for granted, which was exactly what I didn't want to do with my conlang.  But in order to identify those, you have to somehow lift yourself out of your own linguistic box -- which is awfully hard to do.

The second thing, though, was that shortly after chatting about my conlang with my friend, I stumbled on a question on Quora that asked, "What is the hardest language to learn to speak fluently?"  By "hardest" most people assumed "for speakers of English," which went right to what I'd been discussing earlier -- finding out what would seem odd/counterintuitive (and therefore difficult) for English speakers.

Well, between the conversation and the post on Quora, I was led directly into an online research labyrinth, literally for hours.

One respondent to the hardest-language-question said his choice would be the Northwest Caucasian languages of Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia -- a group made up of Abaza, Abkhaz, Adyghe, Kabardian, and Ubykh -- the last-mentioned of which became extinct in 1992 when the last native speaker died of old age.  These languages form an isolate family, related to each other but of uncertain (and undoubtedly distant) relationship to other languages.

So naturally, I had to find out what's weird about them.  Here's what I learned.

Let's start out with the fact that they only have two vowels, but as many as 84 consonants depending on exactly how finely you want to break them up based on the articulation.  They use SOV (subject-object-verb) word order, plopping the verb at the end of the sentence, but that's hardly unique; Latin does that, giving rise to the old quip that by the time a Roman got to the verb in his sentence, his listeners had forgotten who he was talking about.

But in the parlance of the infomercial, "Wait, there's more!"  The Northwest Caucasian languages use agglutination -- gluing together various bits and pieces to make a more specific word -- but only for verbs.  In these languages, a verb is actually a cluster of parts called morphemes that tell you not only what the core verb is, but the place, time, manner of action, whether it's positive or negative, and even the subject's and object's person.

Then, there's the fact that they're ergative-absolutive languages.  When I hit this, I thought, "Okay, I used to know what this meant," and had to look it up.  It has to do with how the subject and object of a sentence are used.  In English (a nominative-accusative language), the subject has the same form regardless of what kind of verb follows it; likewise, the object always is the same.  So the subject of an intransitive verb like "to walk" is the same as the subject for a transitive verb like "to watch."  (We'd say, "she walked" and "she watched [someone or something];" in both cases, you use the form "she.")  The object form of "he" is always "him," regardless of any other considerations in the sentence.

Not so in the Northwest Caucasian languages, and other ergative-absolutive languages, such as Tibetan, Basque, and Mayan.  In these languages, the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive one have the same form; the subject of a transitive verb is the one with the different form.  (If English was an ergative-absolutive language, we might say "He watched her," but then it'd be "her walked.")

So there are lots of things that seem normal, obvious even, which in fact are simply arbitrary rules that we've learned are universal to English, but which are hardly universal to other languages.  It always puts me in mind of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which is that the language you speak shapes your cognitive processes.  In other words, that speakers of languages differently structured from English literally perceive the world a different way because the form of the languages force different conceptualizations of what they see.

I've gone on long enough about all this, and I haven't even scratched the surface.  There are tonal languages like Thai, where the pitch and pitch change of a syllable alter its meaning.  There are languages like Finnish and Japanese where vowel length -- literally, how long you say the vowel for -- changes the meaning of the word it's in.  There are inflected languages like Greek, where the ending of a word tells you how it's being used in the sentence (e.g., in the phrases "the cat walked," "she pet the cat," "it's the cat's bowl," "give the food to the cat," and "the dog is with the cat," the word "cat" would in each case have a different suffix).

So it was a struggle to make my conlang something that would be believable to a linguist, and I can only hope I succeeded well enough to get by.  (Or, in the context of the story, something an actual linguist would invent.)  Of course, being that it's only one small piece of the story, in the end I used something like a dozen phrases total from the language, so it was kind of a lot of work with very little obvious result.

But I figure that in any case, what I came up with has still gotta be more realistic than the Judoon "ro po fo so no do" language from Doctor Who, which I'm only throwing in here because after yesterday's post my author friend Andrew Butters commented that I can always somehow find a way to work in a Doctor Who reference regardless of the topic, and I couldn't just refuse to rise to that challenge.

So there.

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

The mirror crack'd from side to side

I know there are a lot of reasons why people believe weird shit.  It's tempting to settle on the self-congratulatory solution of "Because they're dumber than I am," but I always hesitate to go there because (1) there are lots of inherent biases in our cognitive systems that you can fall for even if you're perfectly intelligent, and (2) I know all too well that I fall for those same biases myself if I'm not careful.

That said, I was sent a link by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia describing something apparently some people believe that left me saying, "Okay, that is incredibly stupid."

The link was to a story by Brent Swancer over at Mysterious Universe called "The Bizarre Tale of the Haunted Website."  Swancer's article goes into considerably more detail, but the bones of the story are as follows.

In the eighteenth century, there was a little girl whose name was "Repleh Snatas."  Repleh had a birthmark on her face that the locals said was the mark of the devil, and people started looking askance at the entire family.  The dad became convinced that his daughter was possessed, and locked her in a room full of mirrors to drive the demons out (as one does), but every morning when he'd check on her the mirrors were all cracked and she was as evil as ever.  Ultimately he killed the girl and his wife and finally himself.  The locals refused to give any of them a proper burial, but tied the three bodies to a tree all facing in different directions and let 'em rot right there.

Once again, as one does.

But Repleh was not so easily vanquished.  She disappeared into mirrors, and if you look into a mirror at night sometimes it will crack and in the fractured reflection you'll see her standing behind you, kind of like what happened to Daughter of Mine at the end of the extremely scary Doctor Who episode "Family of Blood."  Then someone started a website about Repleh, and it does weird stuff like not loading properly or actually crashing your computer.  Even if it loads it's still freaky, with collages of scary photographs of creepy children and hair-raising horror-movie-style background music.  And if you go there, you risk getting Repleh's attention, because she's still hanging around, apparently, and if she thinks you're getting too curious she might kill you.

Reading this elicited several reactions from me:

• "Repleh Snatas" has to be the least convincing fake name I've ever seen. A third-grader could figure out that it's "Satan's Helper" backwards.  What were her parents' names, Tnatsissa Snatas and Dneirftseb Snatas, or something?
• The whole girl-in-the-mirror thing is just a variation on the old kids' game of "Bloody Mary," wherein you stare into a mirror at night and say "Bloody Mary" ten times in a row, and nothing happens.
• A website not loading properly wouldn't indicate much of anything to me, because my computer does weird things like random slowdowns and page crashes pretty much all the time.  My guess is that it has nothing to do with mirrors or creepy ghost kids, but it may mean that I need a new computer.

I went to the website, which is (unsurprisingly) www.replehsnatas.com, and got the following message:

Before going to replehsnatas.com, there's one more step.  By clicking the button below you'll go through a standard security check, after which you will be redirected to Chrome store and will be given the option to install Secured Search extension.  This extension will offer you a safer web search experience by changing your default search provider.

And my response to that was, "How exactly stupid do you think I am?"  I closed the window, meaning that I never got to see the actual page, but it was better than getting whatever malware or virus this was pointing me toward, which would undoubtedly result in my computer running even worse than before.

Despite all this, apparently there are tons of people who think Repleh Snatas is real.  Over on Quora there's a whole discussion of Repleh and how you shouldn't mess around with her website because she's eeee-vil.

Even though I wasn't successful at getting into her website, I was able to find a couple of photographs that are said to be of the wicked Repleh Snatas.  (Yes, I know she supposedly lived in the eighteenth century, before the invention of photography.  Stop asking questions.)  Here's one of them:

The only problem is that this is actually a photograph of Princess Juliana of the Netherlands (who eventually became Queen Juliana).  This would be more obvious if the people who created the Repleh website and added the image hadn't photoshopped out the handwritten words "Princess Juliana" which are (I shit you not) written across the top of the original.

Here's the other one:

And this one is a still-shot of the actress Helena Avellano from her movie Moondial.

So old Repleh is kind of batting zero, here.  This has not stopped dozens of people from writing about her on True Tales of the Paranormal websites, which I will leave you to find on your own, and wherein you will read multiple accounts of the evil Repleh showing up in mirrors and generally scaring the bejeezus out of people.

As I said, I'm not usually going to point fingers at people for slipping into occasional credulity, as long as they're open to correcting themselves when they see what is actually going on.  We all do it; it's part of human nature.

On the other hand, to believe in Repleh Snatas, you have to have the IQ of a PopTart.  I've read some unbelievable paranormal claims before, but this one has to win the prize for sheer goofiness.  So my tolerance of people's foibles can only be stretched so far.

So I'm issuing a challenge to the supernatural believers out there: c'mon, folks.  Up your game.  You can do better than this.  Hell, a sufficiently motivated elementary-school student could do better than this.  The quality of your claims has really been falling off lately.  I'm expecting some better material to work with.

Get with the program, people.

  

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

The cliff's edge

The universe is a dangerous place.

Much of what we've created -- the whole superstructure of civilized life, really -- is built to give us a sense of security.  And it works, or well enough.  During much of human history, we were one bad harvest, one natural disaster, one epidemic from starvation, disease, and death.  Our ancestors were constantly aware that they had no real security -- probably one of the main drivers of the development of religion.

The world is a capricious, dangerous place, but maybe the gods will help me if only I pray hard enough.

When the Enlightenment rolled around in the eighteenth century, science seemed to step in to provide a similar function.  Maybe the world could be tamed if we only understood it better.  Once again, it succeeded -- at least partially.  Industrial agriculture and modern medicine certainly saved millions of lives, and have allowed us to live longer, healthier lives than ever before.  Further reassuring us that it was possible to make the universe a secure, harm-free place for such creatures as us.

And we still have that sense, don't we?  When there's a natural disaster, many people respond, "Why did this happen?"  There's an almost indignant reaction of "the world should be safe, dammit."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons svantassel, Danger Keep Away Sign, CC BY-SA 3.0]

This is why in 2012 a judge in Italy sentenced six geologists to six years in prison and a hefty fines for failing to predict the deadly 2009 L'Aquila earthquake.  There was the sense that if the best experts on the geology of Italy didn't see it coming... well, they should have, shouldn't they?  

That in the present state of our scientific knowledge, it's not possible to predict earthquakes, didn't seem to sway the judge's mind.  "The world is chaotic, dangerous, and incompletely understood" was simply too hard to swallow.  If something happened, and people died, there had to be someone to blame.  (Fortunately, eventually wiser heads prevailed, the charges were thrown out on appeal, and the geologists were released.)

In fact, I started thinking about this because of a study out of the University of California - Riverside that is investigating a technique for predicting earthquake severity based on the direction of propagation of the shock wave front.  This can make a huge difference -- for example, an earthquake on the San Andreas Fault that begins with failure near the Salton Sea and propagates northward will direct more energy toward Los Angeles than one that begins closer in but spreads in the opposite direction.

The scientists are using telltale scratch marks -- scoring left as the rocks slide across each other -- to determine the direction of motion of the quake's shock wave.  "The scratches indicate the direction and origin of a past earthquake, potentially giving us clues about where a future quake might start and where it will go," said Nic Barth, the paper's lead author. " This is key for California, where anticipating the direction of a quake on faults like San Andreas or San Jacinto could mean a more accurate forecast of its impact...  We can now take the techniques and expertise we have developed on the Alpine Fault [in New Zealand] to examine faults in the rest of the world.  Because there is a high probability of a large earthquake occurring in Southern California in the near-term, looking for these curved marks on the San Andreas fault is an obvious goal."

The thing is, this is still short of the ultimate goal of predicting fault failure accurately, and with enough time to warn people to evacuate.  Knowing the timing of earthquakes is something that is still out of reach.

Then there's the study out of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research that found that the Sun and other stars like it are prone to violent flare-ups -- on the average, once every century.  These "superflares" can release an octillion joules of energy in only a few hours.

The once-every-hundred-years estimate was based on a survey of over fifty-six thousand Sun-like stars, and the upshot is that so far, we've lucked out.  The last serious solar storm was the Carrington Event of 1859, and that was the weakest of the known Miyake Events, coronal mass ejections so big that they left traces in tree rings.  (One about fourteen thousand years ago was so powerful that if it occurred today, it would completely fry everything from communications satellites to electrical grids to home computers.)

The problem, once again, is that we still can't predict them; like earthquakes, we can know likelihood but not exactitude.  In the case of a coronal mass ejection, we'd probably have a few hours' notice -- enough time to unplug stuff in our houses, but not enough to protect the satellites and grids and networks.  (If that's even possible.  "An octillion joules" is what is known in scientific circles as "a metric shit tonne of energy.")

"The new data are a stark reminder that even the most extreme solar events are part of the Sun's natural repertoire," said study co-author Natalie Krivova.  "During the Carrington event of 1859, one of the most violent solar storms of the past two hundred years, the telegraph network collapsed in large parts of northern Europe and North America.  According to estimates, the associated flare released only a hundredth of the energy of a superflare.  Today, in addition to the infrastructure on the Earth's surface, especially satellites would be at risk."

All of this, by the way, is not meant to scare you.  In my opinion, the point is to emphasize the fragility of life and of our world, and to encourage you to work toward mitigating what we can.  No matter what we do, we'll still be subject to the vagaries of geology, meteorology, and astrophysics, but right now we are needless adding to our risk by ignoring climate change and pollution, and encouraging the ignorant and ill-founded claims of the anti-vaxxers.  (Just yesterday I saw that RFK Jr., who has been nominated as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, is pursuing the de-authorization of the polio vaccine -- an extremely low-risk preventative that has saved millions of lives.)

Life's risky enough without adding to it by listening to reckless short-term profit hogs and dubiously sane conspiracy theorists.

My point here is that the chaotic nature of the universe shouldn't freeze us into despairing immobility; it should galvanize us to protect what we have.  The unpredictable dangers are a fact of life, and for most of our evolutionary history we were unable to do much about any of them.  Now, for the first time, we have figured out how to protect ourselves from many of the risks that our ancestors faced every day.  How foolish do we as a species have to be to add to those risks needlessly, heedlessly, rushing toward the edge of the cliff when we have the capacity simply to stop?

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

The parasitic model

My post yesterday, about how the profit motive in (and corporate control of) media has annihilated any hope of getting accurate representation of the news, was almost immediately followed up by my running into a story about how the same forces in creative media are working to strangle creativity at its source.

The article was from Publishers Weekly, and was about an interview with HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray.  It centered largely on the company's whole-hearted endorsement of AI as part of its business model.  He describes using AI to take the place both of human narrators for audiobooks and of translators for increasing their sales in non-English-speaking countries, which is troubling enough; but by far his most worrisome comment describes using AI, basically, to be a stand-in for the authors themselves.  Lest you think I'm exaggerating, or making this up entirely, here's a direct quote from the article:

The fast-evolving AI sector could deliver new types of formats for books, Murray said, adding that HC is experimenting with a number of potential products.  One idea is a “talking book,” where a book sits atop a large language model, allowing readers to converse with an AI facsimile of its author.  Speculating on other possible offerings, Murray said that it is now possible for AI to help HC build an entire cooking-focused website using only content from its backlist, but the question of how to monetize such a site remains.

Later in the article, almost offhand, was a comment that while HarperCollins saw their sales go up last year by only six percent, their profits went up by sixty percent.  The reason was a "restructuring" of the company -- which, of course, included plenty of layoffs.

How much of that windfall went to the authors themselves is left as an exercise for the reader. 

I can vouch first-hand that in the current economic climate, it is damn near impossible to make a living as a writer, musician, or artist.  The people who are actually the wellspring of creativity powering the whole enterprise of creative media get next to nothing; the profits are funneled directly into the hands of a small number of people -- the CEOs of large publishing houses, distributors, marketing and publicity firms, and social media companies.

I can use myself as an example.  I have twenty-four books in print, through two small traditional publishers and some that are self-published.  I have never netted more than five hundred dollars in a calendar year; most years, it's more like a hundred.  I didn't go into this expecting to get rich, but I'd sure like to be able to take my wife out to a nice restaurant once a month from my royalties.

As it is, we might be able to split the lunch special at Denny's.

Okay, I can hear some of you say; maybe it's not the system, maybe it's you.  Maybe your books just aren't any good, and you're blaming it on corporate greed.  All right, fair enough, we can admit that as a possibility.  But I have dozens of extraordinarily talented and hard-working writer friends, and they all say pretty much the same thing.  Are you gonna stand there and tell us we're all so bad we don't deserve to make a living?

And now the CEO of HarperCollins is going to take the authors out of the loop even of speaking for ourselves, and just create an AI so readers can talk to a simulation of us without our getting any compensation for it?

Ooh, maybe he could ratchet those profits up into the eighty or ninety percent range if he eliminated the authors altogether, and had AI write the books themselves.

Besides the greed, it's the out-of-touchness that bothers me the most.  Lately I've been seeing the following screenshot going around -- a conversation between Long Island University Economics Department Chair Panos Mourdoukoutas and an ordinary reader named Gwen:

The cockiness is absolutely staggering; that somehow it's better to put even more money in Jeff Bezos's pockets than it is to support public libraries.  They've already got the entire market locked up tight, so what more do the corporate CEOs want?  It's flat-out impossible as an author to avoid selling through Amazon; they've got an inescapable stranglehold on book sales.  And, as I found out the hard way, they also have no problem with reducing the prices set by me or my publisher without permission, further cutting into any profit I get -- but, like HarperCollins, you can bet they make sure it doesn't hurt their bottom line by a single cent.

And don't even get me started about the Mark Zuckerberg model of social media.  When Facebook first really got rolling, authors and other creators could post links to their work, and it was actually not a bad way to (at the very least) get some name recognition.  Now?  Anything with an external link gets deliberately drowned by the algorithm.  Oh, sure, you can post stuff, but no one sees it.  The idea is to force authors to purchase advertising from Facebook instead.

Basically, if it doesn't make Zuckerberg money, you can forget about it.

If I sound bitter about all this -- well, it's because I am.  I've thrown my heart into my writing, and gotten very little in return.  We've ceded the control of the creative spirit of humanity to an inherently parasitic system, where the ones who are actually enriching the cultural milieu are reaping only a minuscule percent of the rewards.

The worst part is that, like the situation I described yesterday regarding the news media, I see no way out of this, not for myself nor for any other creative person.  Oh, we'll continue doing what we do; writing is as much a part of my life as breathing.  But isn't it tragic that the writers, artists, and musicians whose creative spirits nurture all of us have to struggle against seemingly insurmountable odds even to be seen?

All because of the insatiable greed, arrogance, and short-sightedness of a handful of individuals who have somehow ended up in charge of damn near everything that makes life bearable.  People who want more and more and more, and after that, more again.  Millions don't satisfy; they need billions.

As psychologist Erich Fromm put it, "Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever actually reaching satisfaction."

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

The crossroads

I haven't exactly kept it a secret how completely, utterly fed up I am with media lately.

This goes from the miasmic depths of YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok right on up the food chain to the supposedly responsible mainstream media.  I still place a lot of the blame for Donald Trump's victory at the feet of the New York Times and their ilk; for months they ignored every babbling, incoherent statement Trump uttered, as well as the fascistic pronouncements he made during his more lucid moments, while putting on the front page headlines like "Will Kamala's Choice In Shoes Alienate Her From Voters?"

The idea of responsible journalism has, largely, been lost.  Instead we're drowning in a sea of slant and misinformation, generated by a deadly mix of rightward-tilted corporate control and a clickbait mentality that doesn't give a flying rat's ass whether the content is true or accurate as long as you keep reading or watching it.

While the political stuff is far more damaging, being a science nerd, it's the misrepresentation of science that torques me the the most.  And I saw a good example of this just yesterday, with a fascinating study out of the Max Planck Institute that appeared last week in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

First, the actual research.

Using data from the x-ray telescope eROSITA, researchers found that the Solar System occupies a space in one of the arms of the Milky Way that is hotter than expected.  This "Local Hot Bubble" is an irregularly-shaped region that is a couple of degrees warmer than its surroundings, and is thought to have been caused by a series of supernovae that went off an estimated fourteen million years ago.  The bubble is expanding asymmetrically, with faster expansion perpendicular to the plane of the galaxy than parallel to it, for the simple reason that there is less matter in that direction, and therefore less resistance.

One curious observation is that there is a more-or-less cylindrical streamer of hotter gas heading off in one direction from the bubble, pointing in the general direction of the constellation Centaurus.  The nearest object in that direction is another hot region called the Gum Nebula, a supernova remnant, but it's unclear if that's a coincidence.

The Gum Nebula [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Meli Thev, Finkbeiner H-alpha Gum Nebula, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The researchers called this streamer an "interstellar tunnel" and speculated that there could be a network of these "tunnels" crisscrossing the galaxy, connecting warmer regions (such as the nebulae left from supernovae) and allowing for exchange of materials.  How physics allows the streamers to maintain their cohesion, and not simply disperse into the colder space surrounding them, is unknown.  This idea has been around since 1974, but has had little experimental support, so the new research is an intriguing vindication of a fifty-year-old idea.

Okay, ready to hear the headlines I've seen about this story?

• "Scientists Find Network of Interstellar Highways in Our Own Galaxy"
• "A Tunnel Links Us to Other Star Systems -- But Who's Maintaining It?"
• "Mysterious Alien Tunnel Found In Our Region of Space"
• "An Outer Space Superhighway"
• "Scientists Baffled -- We're At The Galactic Crossroads and No One Knows Why"

*brief pause to punch a wall*

Okay, I can place maybe one percent of the blame on the scientists for calling it a "tunnel;" a tunnel, I guess, implies a tunneler.  But look, it's called quantum tunneling, and the aliens-and-spaceships crowd managed to avoid having multiple orgasms about that.  

On the other hand, given the mountains of bullshit out there about quantum resonant energy frequencies of healing, maybe I shouldn't celebrate too quickly.

But the main problem here is the media sensationalizing the fuck out of absolutely everything.  I have no doubt that in this specific case, the whole lot of 'em knew there was nothing in the research that implied a "who" that was "maintaining" these tunnels; the scientists explicitly said there was some unexplained physics here, which was interesting but hardly earthshattering.

But "streamers of gas from a local warm region in our galaxy" isn't going to get most people to click the link, so gotta make it sound wild and weird and woo-woo.

Look, I know this story by itself isn't really a major problem, but it's a symptom of something far worse, and far deeper.  There has got to be a way to impel media to do better.  Media trust is at an all-time low; a study last month estimated it at a little over thirty percent.  And what happens in that situation is that people (1) click on stuff that sounds strange, shocking, or exciting, and (2) for more serious news, gravitate toward sources that reinforce what they already believed.  The result is that the actual facts matter less than presenting people with attractive nonsense, and media consumers never find out if what they believe is simply wrong.

But saying "just don't read the news, because they're all lying" isn't the solution, either.  The likelihood of voting for Trump was strongly correlated with having low exposure to accurate information about current events, something that was exacerbated by his constant message of "everyone is lying to you except for me."

We are at a crossroads, just not the kind the headline-writer was talking about.

Honestly, I don't know that there is an answer, not in the current situation, where we no longer have a Fairness Doctrine to force journalists to be even-handed.  And the proliferation of wildly sensationalized online media sources has made the problem a million times worse.

At this point, I'm almost hoping the people who reported on the astronomy story are right, and we are in the middle of an alien superhighway.  And they'll slow down their spaceship long enough to pick me up and get me the hell off this planet.

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