The image and the reality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Corporate capitalism über alles, as usual.

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

No, farther than that.

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

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

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Island of the dolls

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe bring along a clown, for good measure?

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

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The creative relationship

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

Thus frustrating the absolute hell out of literature teachers everywhere.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Birdwalking into the Miocene

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Encyclopedia Galactica

I was an undergraduate when the original Cosmos first aired.

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

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

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

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

No Andorians yet, more's the pity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Color my world

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Anomaly analysis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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