Friday: Hili dialogue

December 5, 2014 • 3:28 am

Friday, and a bibulous Christmas party for Professor Ceiling Cat and his colleagues. As always, I was the Official Wine Buyer for the Party™ (5 cases of assorted reds and whites), ensuring that the libations are good, even for the many who will overindulge. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili continues to show an amazing erudition, speaking today in Aramaic:

Hili: Mene, Tekel, Upharsin.

A: What did you say?

Hili: Nothing, just that I gained weight.

In Polish:

Hili: Mane, tekel, fares…
Ja: Co mówiłaś?
Hili: Nic, że przybrałam na wadze.

“I’m no scientist”: Colbert on Republican climate-change denialism

December 4, 2014 • 2:22 pm

Here’s our favorite faux-conservative commenting, right after the big Republican gains in the last election, about that party’s view of climate change (i.e., it’s either not happening or IT’S NOT OUR FAULT). As far as I know, 72% of the members of the previous House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology were either outright climate-change denialists or have voted against bills to reduce global warming. That’s a travesty.

But I rant. Here’s Colbert doing a better job with humor (I love his Science Fair-ish experiment at the end):

The world’s oldest graffiti: by Homo erectus! (maybe)

December 4, 2014 • 11:47 am

Look at the shell below, which has been dated to 500,000 years ago. See the scratches? Those represent the oldest human etchings, or graffiti, ever found, preceding the next oldest by 300,000 years! Some anthropologists dissent, but more on that at the end of this post.

sn-clamshellH — Photo by: WIM LUSTENHOUWER/VU UNIVERSITY AMSTERDAM

As Science reports, this shell was found by a graduate student Stephen Monro on Java in 2007, and now, 7 years later (yes, they studied it intensively), he and his colleagues have concluded not only that this was a human production—perhaps made by Homo erectus, who lived on Java at that time—but that they also used the shells as tools.

The full paper is in Nature, with the link and reference below (I believe it’s free). I’ll summarize what’s in the paper, and then go back to the Science report for a dissent by scientists.

The shell was part of an apparent cache of fossil mussel shells excavated in 1890 in Trinil, Java, which happens to be the type locality for Homo erectus, discovered by Eugène Dubois in 1891-1892 and originally called “Java Man“. (We’re not quite sure what happened to H. erectus: it could have interbred with expanding Homo sapiens populations coming from Africa beginning about 60,000 years ago, or it could have gone extinct without leaving descendants.) The dating of the shells from sediments enclosed in them gives an age of about 540,000 ± 10,000 years. Only H. erectus was in Java then.

The shells, too, were collected by Dubois, and, based on their uniform large size and the holes in them (see below), as well as other suggestive human modifications, were probably a midden of sorts left by H. erectus individuals who had eaten the mussels.

Now, the shells show three signs of modification by humans, including the “graffiti” above.

They have holes drilled in them, likely by a human using a shark tooth. They are consistent in location and size, near the rear adductor muscle, and aren’t consistent with holes made by other predators like marine snails or otters. The authors found that you can make these holes with a shark tooth, and if it’s driven into just that spot in the rear, the mussel can’t use its muscle to keep the shell closed and opens, presenting its contents for food. Here’s a photo of the shell holes, presumably made by hominins (all species in our clade after we diverged from the lineage that produced modern chimps). The figure and caption are from the original paper. Similar holes were made by the native (pre-European) inhabitants of the Caribbean to open gastropods.

Some of the shells appear to have been modified for use as cutting or scraping tools. Their outer layer was scraped off down to the nacreous (“pearl-like”) inner layer, making them sharp. These shells show wear patterns consistent with them having been used as tools.

Most interesting, of course, is the graffiti: a poignant remnant of an early human (and yes, they suggest it was a single “person”). The journal’s description of this follows, along with another photo:

“One of the Pseudodon shells, specimen DUB1006-fL, displays a geometric pattern of grooves on the central part of the left valve (Fig. 2). The pattern consists, from posterior to anterior, of a zigzag line with three sharp turns producing an ‘M’ shape, a set of more superficial parallel lines, and a zigzag with two turns producing a mirrored ‘N’ shape. Our study of the morphology of the zigzags, internal morphology of the grooves, and differential roughness of the surrounding shell area demonstrates that the grooves were deliberately engraved and pre-date shell burial and weathering (Extended Data Fig. 5). Comparison with experimentally made grooves on a fossil Pseudodon fragment reveals that the Trinil grooves are most similar to the experimental grooves made with a shark tooth; these experimental grooves also feature an asymmetrical cross- section with one ridge and no striations inside the groove. We conclude that the grooves in DUB1006-fL were made with a pointed hard object, such as a fossil or a fresh shark tooth, present in the Trinil palaeoenvironment. The engraving was probably made on a fresh shell specimen still retaining its brown periostracum, which would have produced a striking pattern of white lines on a dark ‘canvas’. Experimental engraving of a fresh unionid shell revealed that considerable force is needed to penetrate the periostracum and the underlying prismatic aragonite layers. If the engraving of DUB1006-fL only superficially affected the aragonite layers, lines may easily have disappeared through weathering after loss of the outer organic layer. In addition, substantial manual control is required to produce straight deep lines and sharp turns as on DUB1006-fL. There are no gaps between the lines at the turning points, suggesting that attention was paid to make a con- sistent pattern. Together with the morphological similarity of all grooves, this indicates that a single individual made the whole pattern in a single session with the same tool.”

Here’s another figure showing this great specimen, along with its caption:

nature13962-f2 — Figure 2 | The geometric pattern on Pseudodon DUB1006-fL. a, Overview. b, Schematic representation. c, Detail of main engraving area. d, Detail of posterior engravings. Scale bars, 1 cm in a and c; 1 mm in d. See also Extended Data Figs 5 and 6.

And finally, the paper’s conclusion, adding that the authors see this as the earliest use of a natural material to make tools.

The combined evidence for high-dexterity opening of shells, use of shell as a raw material to make tools, and engraving of an abstract pattern on a shell with a minimum age of 0.43 ± 0.05 Myr indicates that H. erectus was the agent responsible for the exploitation of freshwater mussels at Trinil described here. The inclusion of mussels in the diet of H. erectus is not surprising, as predation on aquatic molluscs is observed for many terrestrial mammals, including primates. The reported use of shells as raw material for tool production is the earliest known in the history of hominin technology. It may explain the absence of unambiguous stone artefacts in the Early and Middle Pleistocene of Java, possibly the result of poor local availability of lithic raw material, as also suggested for the much younger (about 110,000 years old) Neanderthal shell tools from Italy and Greece. Our discovery of an engraving on shell substrate is unexpected, because the earliest previously known undisputable engravings are at least 300,000 years younger.

Leaving aside the question of whether these “graffiti” are anything other than a hominin fooling around, or have a more symbolic meaning, there’s at least one anthropologist who takes issue with the claim that these patterns were made by H. erectus. As the Science report notes, the dating could be off, and the scratches made by more recent individuals of H. sapiens:

Yet even if ancient humans engraved the shell, says Russell Ciochon, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, the team has not shown that H. erectus did it. Ciochon, who has spent many years working at sites in Java, agrees with criticisms that the shells have been taken out of context, because Trinil was not an occupation site where early humans actually lived. Rather, Ciochon argues, the human fossils found there (which include a skullcap widely agreed to be H. erectus and a thigh bone that could belong to either H. erectus or H. sapiens,a matter of sharp debate) were washed into the site by a powerful flood, and nothing found with them—including the shells—can be assumed to have been associated with them originally. Although the team dated four of the shells in the collection, including the engraved shell, to about 500,000 years ago using two different techniques on sediments of sand and clay found inside them, Ciochon says that those sediments could have entered the shells during the earlier flood event that created the site, and that H. sapiens still could have come along much later and performed the etching.

I don’t have the expertise to judge how powerful this criticism is, but if it’s accurate, then the whole story goes out the window pending further study and excavation. But I like the H. erectus story, for, as Jake says to Brett in the last line of The Sun Also Rises, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

h/t: Gravelinspector

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J. C. A. Joordens et al. 2014. Homo erectus at Trinil on Java used shells for tool production and engraving. Nature, published online, doi:10.1038/nature13962

Shermer has a woo experience, admits there may be something to it

December 4, 2014 • 8:25 am

UPDATE: I’ve heard from Michael, who emphasizes that he does not think that the experience implies the supernatural or the paranormal, and he points to a clarification (mentioned by a reader) that Shermer recently published in a “Big Ideas” piece on Slate. Distressingly, that piece is part of a discussion/advertisement sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation (subject: “What is the future of religion?”), and the discussants are well remunerated by the Foundation. (I loathe these “Big Questions” pieces, which are really ads, not articles in Slate or the New York Times.) But the point of Shermer’s piece stands: he affirms clearly that he doesn’t accept the supernatural, and he’s going to add the update to his original Sci. Am. post.

But this sentence still remains in his text: “I have to admit, it rocked me back on my heels and shook my skepticism to its core as well.” Bad choice of words.

UPDATE 2: Michael has written a clarification of his piece for me to put up, and here it is:

I read your commentary, Jerry, and as usual with your critiques in your blog I agree with all your points about my Scientific American column. To clarify matters please see this further explanation of my interpretation, which is that my experience in no way implies something paranormal or supernatural. As I’ve always said (and repeat here), there’s no such thing as the paranormal or supernatural; there is just the normal, the natural, and mysteries as yet unexplained by natural law and chance/contingency.

Much has been made of the subtitle of the original column (stating that my skepticism was shaken to the core), a variation of which was used for the Online title of the essay. As is common in all magazine and newspaper articles, essays, and opinion editorials, the editors write the title and subtitle in a way that will make the article seem more compelling to read, and that is the case here. My Scientific American editors give me much freedom in choosing my own titles and subtitles, but when they have done rewrites for previous columns I have always felt they were better than my original, and this one seemed good to me at the time. But now I see that many readers took it in a way I had not intended. My skepticism is in fine shape.

Hopefully this clarification in Slate will clear up matters. I guess if I had to sum it up even briefer it would be this: Weird things happen. We can’t explain everything. Enjoy the experience. But don’t abandon science or the natural worldview.

Michael

My only response besides expressing relief, is the one above: the title and subtitle were actually taken from Shermer’s own words. But again, his stand is clear, and that’s what we should take away from this (besides the lesson to be careful with words!).
__________________________

When a reader sent this to me, I was naturally curious, and so went over to Scientific American to see what all the fuss was about.

There I found Michael’s piece, “Anomalous events that can shake one’s skepticism to the core,” which recounts a story that happened to him when he got married. It’s a short piece, so you can read it yourself, but a brief synopsis follows. Before the wedding, Shermer’s fiancée Jennifer received a box of stuff that belonged to her beloved grandfather, stuff that included his broken 1978 transistor radio. It was busted, and Shermer tried to fix it, even putting in new batteries and banging it about, but no dice. The radio was kaput.

But it came back to life, and at a weird time. Shermer tells the rest:

Three months later, after affixing the necessary signatures to our marriage license at the Beverly Hills courthouse, we returned home, and in the presence of my family said our vows and exchanged rings. Being 9,000 kilometers from family, friends and home, Jennifer was feeling amiss and lonely. She wished her grandfather were there to give her away. She whispered that she wanted to say something to me alone, so we excused ourselves to the back of the house where we could hear music playing in the bedroom. We don’t have a music system there, so we searched for laptops and iPhones and even opened the back door to check if the neighbors were playing music. We followed the sound to the printer on the desk, wondering—absurdly—if this combined printer/scanner/fax machine also included a radio. Nope.

At that moment Jennifer shot me a look I haven’t seen since the supernatural thrillerThe Exorcist startled audiences. “That can’t be what I think it is, can it?” she said. She opened the desk drawer and pulled out her grandfather’s transistor radio, out of which a romantic love song wafted. We sat in stunned silence for minutes. “My grandfather is here with us,” Jennifer said, tearfully. “I’m not alone.”

Shortly thereafter we returned to our guests with the radio playing as I recounted the backstory. My daughter, Devin, who came out of her bedroom just before the ceremony began, added, “I heard the music coming from your room just as you were about to start.” The odd thing is that we were there getting ready just minutes before that time, sans music.

Spooky, no? Even spookier is that the radio then played through the night, but went dead the next day and has never worked since.

What can we conclude? Shermer, I believe, has published on the fact that such coincidences happen; and with stuff like broken watches restarting when Uri Geller appears on television, you can actually calculate the probability that it would happen among thousands of people watching. It’s not miniscule. Further, as Shermer has pointed out, incidents like the above stick in one’s mind as anomalies, and can be interpreted as miracles, but what does not stick in our minds is the vastly more numerous times when these coincidences do not occur.

The parsimonious conclusion, given our lack of evidence that the dead somehow live on and try to communicate with us, is that the radio’s new batteries and getting whacked somehow turned it on. Indeed, Shermer asserts that that’s the logical explanation had it happened to someone else:

What does this mean? Had it happened to someone else I might suggest a chance electrical anomaly and the law of large numbers as an explanation—with billions of people having billions of experiences every day, there’s bound to be a handful of extremely unlikely events that stand out in their timing and meaning. In any case, such anecdotes do not constitute scientific evidence that the dead survive or that they can communicate with us via electronic equipment.

But it happened to Shermer, so, as he says below, it “shook his skepticism to the core.”

Jennifer is as skeptical as I am when it comes to paranormal and supernatural phenomena. Yet the eerie conjunction of these deeply evocative events gave her the distinct feeling that her grandfather was there and that the music was his gift of approval. I have to admit, it rocked me back on my heels and shook my skepticism to its core as well. I savored the experience more than the explanation.

The emotional interpretations of such anomalous events grant them significance regardless of their causal account. And if we are to take seriously the scientific credo to keep an open mind and remain agnostic when the evidence is indecisive or the riddle unsolved, we should not shut the doors of perception when they may be opened to us to marvel in the mysterious.

Sorry, but the emotional resonances of such events don’t give them any greater credibility than possible scientific explanations, if that’s what Shermer means by “significance.”

And I’m not sure why it should shake his skepticism to the core simply because it happened to him. After all, if it happened, it had to happen to someone!

Shermer’s last paragraph is a bit distressing to me, for he made no attempt to gather more evidence—by looking at the radio, for instance. The “evidence” he has is a one-off event, so is he really going to remain agnostic about the possibility that the dead grandfather was somehow trying to communicate with his wife? After all, people have rare experiences seeing or talking to God, so is Shermer going to remain agnostic about God as well? I don’t think so.

Yes, if there were repeated evidence for the dead trying to reach their descendants (and, after all, why didn’t Grandpa simply speak to them?), we should indeed discard our tentative conclusion that the dead don’t communicate with us. But this is a one-off event—certainly not enough to make scientists and skeptics revisit our provisional rejection of communication from the dead.

But it’s no wonder that Shermer got so much mail about this. For those who believe in an afterlife, this somehow buttresses their delusions, and for Scientific American readers like the one below, Shermer is allowing a personal experience to shake his skepticism so severely that he now becomes an agnostic about communicating with the dead. That’s just weird.

Take-home lesson for all skeptics: one off coincidences like this should not suddenly make us agnostic about the numinous and the supernatural, especially when they aren’t repeated or investigated thoroughly.

Here’s one comment on Shermer’s piece—a comment that’s on the money:

Michael,

I was embarrassed to read your concluding paragraph. What are we to keep an open mind about? That Jennifer’s dead grandfather maybe fixed the radio? Did he even know how to fix radios? Wouldn’t there be an easier way for the dead to communicate with the living? It would be mildly interesting to have an electronics expert determine exactly what is wrong with the radio.

Regards,

–Mark

h/t: Barry

Readers’ wildlife photos

December 4, 2014 • 7:32 am

Well, if the rocket goes up it will be 14 minutes from now: just enough time to enjoy the birds.

Reader Ed Kroc sent a bunch of swell bird photos and informative commentary. Enjoy!

I pass along to you the residents of a gorgeously sunny and cold afternoon at Tsawwassen Spit in Delta, BC, just south of Vancouver.

First, a Black Turnstone (Arenaria melanocephala) resting among the kelp washed ashore by the tides. This was one of two I encountered before the sun fully broke through the clouds, so the lighting isn’t as vibrant as in the other photos. Still, you can tell these guys are friendly, though also quite shy.

As soon as the last bits of clouds were pulverized by the November sun, I caught sight of the ostentatious orange bill of a Black Oystercatcher (Haematopus bachmani) spying on me from the breakwater. He/she crept up to the top of the rocks for a clearer look, and then stayed for the sunlight. These are definitely one of my favourite shorebirds. They make loud, flute-like alarm calls when you venture too close, and continue these calls as they fly away in irritation if you linger.

But of course their most distinct feature is the colour of the bill (and eyes and eye-ring). Why are these things such bright orange? Why are they in such stark contrast to the rather discreet plumage? As far as I know, this is a universal feature among Oystercatchers the world over, for example the American (H. palliatus) and Eurasian (H. ostralegus) species. Is there a selective advantage that these colours confer? Sexual selection seems unlikely to me since both sexes look essentially the same (although interestingly, females do tend to be a bit bulkier and possess larger bills). I’m hard-pressed to think of many other plovers that exhibit such stark contrasts in the colouration of their features.

Oh hai!

Onto the gulls. Sitting alone on the glassy waters surrounding the spit was a single Bonaparte’s Gull (Chroicocephalus philadelphia), a first winter juvenile. These guys pass through BC on the way to their wintering homes on the US Gulf Coast. Note the different genus from the customary Larus that contains most gulls. Like this Bonaparte’s, species in Chroicocephalus tend to be on the small side for members of the Laridae family. Meanwhile, standing atop a lamppost, high above the spit, the shore, and the sporadic ferry traffic, a female Glaucous-winged Gull (Larus glaucescens) watched the world move along.

Bonaparte’s gull:

Glaucous-winged gull:

A trio of Passeriformes to end the afternoon. First is a juvenile Golden-crowned Sparrow (Zonotrichia atricapilla). About a dozen juveniles were socializing and feasting on the withered bits of what looks like some kind of chrysanthemum that lined a relatively protected part of the spit. You can just barely see the beginnings of the eponymous golden crown emerging on this juvenile’s forehead.

Sitting alone on a piece of driftwood, a Savannah Sparrow (Passerculus sandwichensis) soaked up the sun.

Not too far away, a female Snow Bunting (Plectrophenax nivalis) gave me some curious looks as she hopped through the grasses and picked through the pebbles of her winter home. These birds nest in the high Arctic and winter across most of southern Canada and the northern US (also northern Europe and Russia). Like most birds that breed in the Arctic, these guys moult into a more earthy plumage when they make the trip south for the winter, a convenient adaptation and also one that I believe is highly convergent across different lineages.

They’re gonna launch the sucker TOMORROW

December 4, 2014 • 5:51 am

UPDATE 1: (0754 a.m. EST): Damn! Another hold due to wind gusts. Keep watching.

UPDATE 2: Launch now set at 0826 a.m. EST, in ten minutes.

UPDATE 3: Launch put back on hold; a drain in the liquid oxygen tanks has apparently malfunctioned.

UPDATE 4: 0832 EST, they’re recycling the valves on the boosters, and if that works, they’ll go back into launch mode. No launch time set yet; there’s about an hour left for the launch window.

UPDATE 5: 0850 EST. They are standing by for word on the “booster core liquid hydrogen fill-and-drain valves.” I’m starting to think this thing is not going to get off the ground today. . .

UPDATE 6: 0906 EST. They’re still recycling the damn valves. 40 minutes left in the launch window, so they could still launch if the damn valves work. Meanwhile, I’m getting weary of waiting.

UPDATE 7: The last valve didn’t work properly; they’re going to refill the tanks and then do the troubleshooting “cycling test” again. The window for launch is closing rapidly: about 20 minutes left. If this doesn’t work, it’s all over for today.

UPDATE 8: They’ve set a new tentative launch time (if everything works) for 0944 am EST, about 15 minutes from now.

UPDATE 9: The launch for today has been scrubbed. They’ll try again tomorrow. Bummer.
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The wind hold on Orion’s launch has expired, and there’s only 5 minutes before it goes up. Go watch at the BBC here.

“I Want You Back”

December 4, 2014 • 5:43 am

Wake up! Here’s a song that’s almost as good as coffee.

Michael Jackson was already a performing genius back in 1969 when this song was released. Jackson was only 11, but look at the guy sing and dance! His talent was huge even then.

Written by the group called “The Corporation”, comprising Motown founder Berry Gordy as well as Freddie Perren, Alphonzo Mizelland and Deke Richards, the instrumental introduction, a specialty of Motown, is a classic (I invented my own dance step for it). And despite the fact that this is by what would now be called a “boy band,” and that the lead singer wasn’t even in his teens, it’s a soul classic—one of the greats. And it’s a great dancing song.

“I want you back” is #121 on Rolling Stones’ list of the 5oo Greatest [Rock] songs of all time. I have a lot of problems with that list, but am still considering doing a countdown starting from #500, putting up one song a day on this site. That would take about one year and five months.

As far as I can tell, this is a live performance:

Orion launches in 42 minutes! (Delay: you can still watch)

December 4, 2014 • 4:22 am

UPDATE: As of 7:17 a.m. EST Oriion is still not launched due to wind delays. If the link below doesn’t work (and it didn’t for me), go to the BBC link here.

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Or 7:05 Eastern time in the US. Watch it live here (click on screenshot below to go to NASA television). You can do it now to watch an informative clip about the mission.

And read about it here.

This is a test of the spacecraft that, if these early tests succeed, may one day put humans on Mars.

Don’t miss the launch! I won’t.

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