Holy Shit, Senses!

Senses! Everyone knows we have five of them, right? Sight, Hearing, Taste, Touch, and Smell. We all learned that in Kindergarten, so why bother writing a whole blog post about it?

Well, one good reason is that we all learned wrong. There are more than five senses. I mean, it's not even close. There's not really a consensus on the exact number, either. The number doesn't really matter. Think of it like individual parts of your body. How do you define a "part?" Is your forearm a different "part" than your whole arm?

And where does your Foreman come into play?

That's how it is with sense. You've got your traditional senses, which the Elizabethans called the "Five Wits" (incidentally, that's where the phrase "keep your wits about you" comes from). Then you have things like thermoception. That's your ability to detect temperature. You could argue that it's part of your sense of touch, but when you shiver, is it really a response to touching something cold?

Then there's proprioception. That's your sense of where your body is. It's another one that's either ignored or thrown in with touch. We can demonstrate the issue with that by performing a ten second experiment. Put your hand behind your head. You can't see it. You can't feel it. But you know where your hand is. You know what it's doing. That's your kinesthetic sense, otherwise known as "proprioception." It's what lets you touch your nose with your finger even when you close your eyes.

Uh...you know...in most cases.

How about your sense of balance? Can't really call that one touch, can you? It's based in your inner ear, and I don't think anyone would argue that it's part of hearing, either. But you can stand on thin surface and innately know when you're beginning to tilt too far in any direction.

There are tons of sense that you use all the time without thinking about it. Knowing when you need to breathe, knowing when you need to empty your little bladder or evacuate your bowels, feeling the urge to vomit, and even recognizing the passage of time are all senses beyond the traditional five.

If that's not enough to get you excited, think of it this way: most people want to experience the world in ways they never could before. One way to do that is by consciously recognizing what our bodies are automatically doing for us. When you acknowledge that you know where your hand is because of a sense you never knew you had, you're paving a conscious road where there was once only a subconscious dirt path.

See, the road roller is a metaphor for thinking.

And isn't that cool?

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, the Great War!

One hundred years and two days ago, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia after a series of political machinations that followed the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Due to a tangled web of alliances and escalations, this declaration of war was followed by at least half a dozen others in less than a week. The next four years tore Continental Europe apart, both figuratively and literally.

This is Beaumont-Hamel after almost a century of healing.

World War I isn't as sexy as its sequel. It's much messier. There's not a clear "bad guy" to hate. I mean, if you're looking for a villain, you're not going to do much better than friggin' Hitler. No such luck in The Great War. The villain there was the war itself. The trenches. The ineffectual artillery barrages and futile charges into certain death. The gas.

Which...you know...fuck that noise.

All told, nearly 18 million men, women, and children died as a direct result of the war. That's close to 2% of the population of the participating countries. Some fared worse than others. Serbia may have lost as much as 18% of their population, which...Jesus, can you imagine what that would do to your country? That's not to mention the specific battles like the Battle of the Somme, where the first day of the fighting cost 20,000 allied lives and resulted in a single mile change in the battle lines.

It was horrific, to say the least. And a lot of people will tell you it started because of a sandwich. Because several assassination attempts failed on the day Franz Ferdinand's death set the wheels in motion, and Gavrilo Princip happened to sit down and ruminate on the day's events with a sandwich from a deli that happened to be exactly where the Archduke's car would stop after the driver got turned around. Rest assured, though, that the sandwich had nothing to do with it.

It wasn't a coincidence. Princip went there not to ruminate, but because he suspected that the motorcade would come that way. Aside from that, the bare fact is (and I can't believe I find it necessary to explain this) sandwiches don't cause world wars. Not even a little bit. World Wars are caused by tangled webs of diplomacy, mass escalation at crises, and overconfident world leaders whose only experience with war is in fighting a vastly technologically inferior foe.

Which was this whole other thing

If it wasn't Franz Ferdinand, it probably would have been someone else. Germany, France, England, Russia, and Austria-Hungary were positively itching for a fight. Germany was once the voice of reason. Otto von Bismark kept the whole thing together more or less by sheer force of will for quite some time. But then he was sacked, and the world began its inexorable march toward a preview of Armageddon. And no, I don't mean the campy oil industry wet dream film.

After the Great War came and went, nothing would ever be the same. My pet example of the effects of World War I is Dadaism. The avant-garde art movement was born of a complete rejection of everything in civilization up to that point, because that's what got us into this mess. Realism, reason, and logic were thrown out the window, and artists embraced the absurd. Because when you're dealing with constant explosions, fruitless sacrifices, and gas that melts your face and lungs, what else are you going to embrace?

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, J. C. Penney

Ron Johnson was on the roll to end all roles in 2011. He was the man behind the Apple Store. He transformed computer sales from the darkly-lit fringe outfits of the '90s to the bright, minimalist, inviting atmosphere of today. In many ways, he made technology cool, and as a result he saw his bank account grow by some $400 million.

J. C. Penney, hungry for a hip new image, saw an enormous opportunity in Johnson. They brought him on as CEO in November of 2011 and tasked him with turning their tired old retail outfit into a hipster paradise of Apple proportions. So Johnson set to work.

"My ideas are big, you guys."

Step one: he hired a fellow Apple veteran as COO and fired a number of the stuffy old suits at JCP. He was taking the company in a new direction, and their input would be outdated.

Step two: he started courting hip brands, with the goal of redefining the type of person who shops at J. C. Penney.

"Seriously, though. Really big."

Step three: he took a jackhammer to the dishonest pricing policies of the old retail market. This was the big one. Standard practice in retail is to price everything on the high end, then have special discounts literally all the time to bring the price down to something that isn't exciting, but fair. Johnson wanted that to change. He repriced everything JCP carried to a lower, fairer price, then did away with constant coupons and specials.

It was a refreshing way for a CEO to look at business. He was keeping the actual, long-term interests of customers in mind. He was treating them like mature adults. Not children. Not sheep to be easily led astray by bright, flashy colors and big red lines through high dollar values and sunbursts with percentages in them. His ideas were truly visionary.

"Like, this big!"

And they failed harder than any ideas in the history of retail. I mean, they nearly ran J. C. Penney, a century-old institution, into the ground. As it turns out, people like instant gratification. They respond to it. They almost demand it. It makes them feel clever. When Johnson took that away from his customers, they took their business away from him.

J. C. Penney's stock price was cut in half during Johnson's tenure. Feedback from employees and customers alike was almost universally disdainful. After just over a year, he was removed from his position as CEO.

"Oh. Well, shit."

There are two lessons to be learned from this epic failure to market properly. The first is that retailers scam the shit out of you. Their sales practices are deceitful, and are based on the idea that you'll pay full price if you have a coupon pretending that "full price" is a discount. The second is that, if they didn't do these things all of these companies would die. Because we secretly like it.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Delta 32!

C-C Chemokine Receptor Type 5, or CCR5, is a protein in your white blood cells. We don't know its exact function, but we're pretty sure it interacts with T cells, and it may play a key role in inflammations that result from infection. All in all, it's a pretty standard white blood cell protein. That's what HIV counts on.

Some forms of HIV use CCR5 as their point of entry into your immune system. When that happens, shit gets bad. That's why most early drugs given to HIV positive people target CCR5. It's more or less the main point of entry for the AIDS virus.

It's like that drainage grate at Helm's Deep. Only, you know, AIDS.

Now let's take a quick two and a half thousand year trip to the past and take a look at Ancient Athens. In 430 BC, the second year of the Peloponnesian War, Athens was struck with a massive, horrific plague that wiped out a fourth of its population. It was at this point in human history when CCR5 started to change. Medicine back then consisted mainly of blood-letting, the type of thing that lands you in a psyche ward nowadays. Back then you paid people to do it to you.

As a result, natural selection weeded out a lot of people via disease. Many survived, of course. Some of them had a bizarre natural resistance, which we now call CCR5-Δ32, or Delta 32. It's a gene mutation. A tiny variation in your genetic makeup that essentially deletes a certain segment of the CCR5 protein. As smallpox and various other diseases spread across Europe, the Delta 32 mutation became more common in the survivors, conferring various immunities to a lucky minority.

Alas, this did not include immunity to ludicrous superstitious violence.

Today, Delta 32 is found in about 10-15% of European-descended humans. The segment of CCR5 that it deletes turns out to be a chief cause of all kinds of problems. That includes the aforementioned HIV. I suppose you can see what I'm getting at. If you are of European descent, there is as much as a 15% chance that you are, if not immune, then highly resistant to the AIDS virus.

That's evolution at work. Think of the untold thousands of people who had to die so that this mutation could become as prevalent as it is. Think of how many people would have to suffer today for it to become a common feature in human beings. This relatively new strength, like all the strengths we enjoy as a species, came at a massive cost over thousands of years.

Luckily, we've gotten pretty good at tinkering with evolution since then. Rather than opening our veins and hoping all the sick pours out with our blood, we use real science to develop real medicine that really works. And the discovery of the Delta 32 mutation is a boon for medicine. We don't know how, and we don't know for sure it'll work, but it's very possible that this natural resistance might hold the key to curing HIV, a disease that only twenty years ago was synonymous with a death sentence.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, the Toba Catastrophe!

I believe we've established by now that supervolcanic eruptions would suck harder than the vacuum of space. In case you needed a little extra evidence of that, let's take a look at the eruption of the Lake Toba supervolcano. It happened around 70,000 years ago, and was terrifying.

The Toba Supervolcano Eruption may have been the single largest volcanic event in the known history of the planet. It spewed so much ash into the air that all of South Asia was covered with about six inches of it. Six inches of ash. Over an entire sub-continent. That's about 800 cubic kilometers of volcano vomit.

Why, yes, I am an adult. Why do you ask?

Even bigger were the long term effects. All that ash and sulphur dioxide is not so great for the global climate, as it turns out. There is some debate on the issue, but it has been suggested that the Earth's most recent ice age was either ushered in by, or a direct result of the Toba Catastrophe. For six years after the eruption, the planet was consumed by a volcanic winter. The following 1,000 years were a period of global cooling.

Which was just murder for the poor tauntauns

Right now, some of you are thinking, "Hey neat! A solution to global warming! Maybe a supervolcano eruption wouldn't be so bad after all!"

To you I say, "Nay." For there is a minor detail I left out before. Human beings were around before the Toba eruption. Afterward (or so goes the theory), we very, very nearly weren't. By some accounts, humanity sank into a genetic bottleneck in the aftermath of Toba. In fact, the human population of Earth may have dropped to around 10,000 people. By comparison, there are seven billion people today. That difference in population is literally too large to meaningfully display on a computer monitor.

10,000 is about one person per twenty square miles. It's not enough people to make up a city in some parts of the world. You'll find significantly more people per day in any one of the parks of Disney World than there were people in existence after the Toba Event.

And the rides in the apocalypse weren't nearly as fun.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Ayapaneco!

Ayapaneco is a language native to the village of Ayapa in Tobasco, Mexico. It's not doing too hot right now. In fact, it's one of a growing number of languages in danger of extinction.

This happens all the time. Local dialects and whole languages sometimes have very few speakers. All it takes is a few deaths to make an entire dictionary of unique words, an entire canon of grammatical rules and nuances to completely disappear from the Earth and become lost to history. And I don't mean "nobody speaks Latin but hardcore Catholics and nerds" lost. I mean "nobody in the world can ever know what these words ever sounded like or meant anymore" lost.

Way deader than Gavroche

There are movements to keep this kind of thing from happening. Linguists are dispatched to remote areas where endangered languages are spoken, where they rudely shove a microphone into the faces of the locals until they have enough audio from interviews and eavesdropping to compose a decent primer. With Ayapaneco, the efforts of linguists have been stunted by a unique issue.

The language became endangered because Mexico made it mandatory for schools to teach Spanish. It's not a bad idea, per se. It's a lot easier to conduct any type of business if there's not a ludicrously obscure language barrier between you and your neighbor. The downside, though, is that some of the vibrant culture, customs, and even words of small, rural areas are fading away. The other downside is that it implicitly treats other languages as inferior to the European one that was imposed on the area in an unabashedly imperialistic way several centuries ago, but we won't get into that right now.

Long story short, this guy was a dick

The biggest obstacle for preserving Ayapaneco (the aforementioned unique issue) is this: There are exactly two people in the entire world who can fluently speak Ayapaneco. Both are well into their 70s and both live in the village of Ayapa. But they don't talk to each other. Because they don't like each other.

It's not totally clear why, and it seems that they just have clashing personalities. Despite being literally the last two people on Earth who can talk to one another in their native language, they choose not to. Because "Eh, fuck that guy." I don't know about you, but this whole situation makes me a little depressed. A once vibrant, ancient language exists only in two minds. If they want to have the kind of conversations they had in their youths, they have only each other to talk to. And they won't. And because of that, it's probably going to be too difficult for linguists to get a handle on their endangered mother tongue and keep it from dying with them.

An apathetic grudge will probably soon be the undoing of an entire language.

Holy shit.

Oh, and happy new year.

Holy Shit, Moon Landings!

Let me just get this out of the way right off the bat: we put human beings into a small capsule attached to several enormous machines that create aimed and sustained explosions which carried them off of the goddamn planet all the way to the goddamn moon, both of which are in constant motion. They landed and walked on the surface of the moon, then came back home and survived re-entry. We did this six times, and for some reason we haven't even really tried to do it again in over 40 years.

Look at her face. She misses us.

Holy shit.

There is no part of the concept of people walking the surface of the moon that is not profoundly incredible. Literally incredible to a lot of people. Otherwise we wouldn't have the conspiracy theories about it being a hoax. Which are just plain wrong.

Apollo 11, the first manned spacecraft to bring human beings to the moon, had less computing power than a modern graphing calculator. It traveled through 238,900 miles of pure nothing to deposit people onto the lunar surface. Imagine what we could do with the power we have today?

Astronauts could pipe in some tunes!

And have you paid attention to rockets? Do you know what they are? They're pretty much the same thing as missiles. NASA managed to point one of those things at a moving target (albeit a big and predictable one) with enough accuracy and controlled chaos that they could not only fling astronauts to the moon, but do it safely.

Don't make a fart joke, don't make a fart joke, don't make a fart joke...

Neil Armstrong stepped out of the landing module and he was, by most definitions, an alien. Then he flubbed his line (no really, it was supposed to be "one small step for a man," which makes more sense), planted a flag too close to the landing site, picked up some rocks, and went back to Earth. And they made it. Safely. After knocking over the flag during takeoff. Don't worry, even the ones that weren't knocked over have been bleached white by the untempered radiation of the sun by now.

The real kicker for me, though, is the fact that the United States, the only country to have ever put human beings onto the surface of another celestial body, did so six times within a three year period, then never did it again. The entire time we were at it, the public, half awed by the monumental accomplishment they were witnessing, were clamoring about "more important problems back home." You hear the same argument today.

How is this not worthy of attention?

To which I like to say, "Are you fucking kidding me? Look at that shit. Look at what we did, America. Jesus. The moon. We went there." Saying that we shouldn't try exploring space until we've solved all of the problems on Earth is like saying you shouldn't try to get a job until you've figured out how to stop needing to eat. It's pure bullshit.

And seriously, look at that. It's a man on the moon.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, The Most Astounding Fact!

I'm just going to let Neil deGrasse Tyson take this one, because I'm lazy and he puts it more eloquently than I could ever hope to.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Black Holes!

Somewhere out in the inconceivable vastness of space, there are regions that were once incredibly massive stars which have now collapsed upon themselves. The result is a chunk of mass so incredibly dense that its gravitational field lets nothing escape. Not even light, and light is pretty damn fast, as you may well know. When mass gets that compacted, space and time get warped and deformed around it, which causes what we call a black hole.

When I say compacted, I mean really, ridiculously, unbelievably compacted. To the point where a black hole the size of a marble would have more mass than the entire Earth. Despite that, there are actually micro black holes that are so imperceptibly small that they have about the same mass as a flea's egg. On the other hand, there are black holes in that same category that have approximately the same mass as the moon. Is that sinking in? The smallest category of black holes range in mass from about the same as a flea's egg to about the same as the freaking moon.

At black hole density, this would sink to the core of the Earth and cause very bad things.

The next category up contains stellar black holes, which get up to about the size of Manhattan and have about ten times the mass of the sun. After that comes intermediate-mass black holes, which is where it starts getting harder to fathom. These get up to the size of the Earth and have the mass of one thousand suns.

Then we get into the last category. The supermassive black holes. These puppies are some of the biggest things in the known universe. They can reach up to 10 Astronomical Units in size. That's 10 times the distance between the Earth and the sun, which is about 93 million miles. Times ten. At that size, their mass could be the same as one billion suns. Supermassive black holes are, therefore, rather aptly named. Scientists believe that they exist at the center of every galaxy in the universe, which means we are currently orbiting a star which is itself orbiting an incredibly enormous distortion in space and time.

The bright spot in the center is light being warped and consumed

One more thing, and I think you know what it is. It's the burning question that always creeps up from the back of your mind when you think about black holes. What happens when you go into one? The answer, mostly, is that we don't know. What we do know, however, is what it would look like to observers.

So let's say your friend is in a spaceship headed toward a black hole, toward the point of no return known as the event horizon. As the ship gets closer, it seems to slow down - time is dilated in such a way that anything close to the event horizon appears to be moving slower and slower, until finally the movement is so small that it can't be seen. Eventually, it stops. As far as you're concerned, your friend is frozen in time forever. But that's just you. Your buddy will experience whatever there is to experience in the black hole. Probably death, I'm sure, but as it happens, time around him will pass. Infinitely.

Holy shit. That might be a little too heavy, so here's a puppy:

D'aww

Holy Shit, Geologic Time!

The Earth is old. Very old. About 4.54 billion years old. That's 4,540,000,000. The number of years the Earth has been around is about an inch long on my screen. It can be hard to grasp just how very, very old the Earth is, so geologists developed what they call the Geologic Time Scale, or Deep Time, which is like a calendar with much bigger intervals.It measures time between major periods of the Earth's formative years. It starts off in the Precambrian Period, which is literally 86% of our planet's history, and we know little to nothing about it. The Earth went from a ball of molten rock to a life-sustaining planet with its very own moon in the roughly four billion years of the Precambrian.

It's subdivided, of course, and we do know some of the history. We know, for example, that the earliest evidence of primordial life crops up in the fossil record around 4 billion years ago, and the oldest definitive proof of said primordial life comes from about 3.6 billion years ago. We know that photosynthetic organisms started producing oxygen (you know, that stuff we breathe?) in large amounts about 3.5 billion years ago, which eventually caused an ecological catastrophe when it changed the composition of the Earth's atmosphere. More on that in a later post, because damn.

Then this thing happened on our planet.

The Precambrian Era ended, appropriately enough, with the Cambrian Explosion, in which animals suddenly evolved out of nowhere and started taking over the food chain. And inventing the food chain, because it really wasn't much of a thing yet. From there, stuff happened. A lot of stuff, but I'm not here to give you a rundown of everything that has ever happened on Earth. I'm here to give you a sense of perspective.

To that end, let's imagine that everything that has ever happened, happened within one year. The formation of the Earth happened at midnight on January 1. Today, at this moment, it is midnight on January 1 of the following year. On this scale:

• The earliest stages of life didn't come around until February 25th. 
• Oxygen appeared in the atmosphere on June 13th, almost halfway through the year. 
• Animals didn't come around until November 15th. 
• Dinosaurs appeared on December 9th and were completely snuffed out by December 24th after only two weeks of existence, if you don't account for different species. Which is irresponsible.

As for humans? We just showed up four minutes ago as a species, and for most of that time we've been sitting around and scratching out heads. It wasn't until four seconds ago that anyone figured out we could write something. On the grand scale of geologic time, all of human history has been recorded in the last four seconds.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Partisanship!

I'm going to be a bit brief in the next couple of entries because I have another project going on at the moment that's taking up a lot of my time. With the election over, I thought it might be a good time to start talking politics. Because that's the twisted logic according to which my brain operates.

Specifically, I want to talk about divisive partisanship. I can't tell you how many times I've heard someone claiming that we live in the most divisive political climate in American History. They say this with a straight face. My response, invariably, is a boisterous and confident "NUH UH!"

Let's take a quick look at the historical facts, starting with the race between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams in 1800. Two great men, right? What a world to live in, where you have a choice between two of the greatest politicians in American history. Surely such a race was civil and based on the facts and issues, and people knew they were in good hands no matter what, right?

Hell-to-the-No. It was just as bitter as any election you remember. According to one newspaper friendly to John Adams:

"If Thomas Jefferson wins, murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will be openly taught and practiced. The air will be rent with the cries of the distressed, the soil will be soaked with blood, and the nation black with crimes. Are you prepared to see your dwellings in flames, female chastity violated, and children writhing on a pike?"

And then we built this.

I mean, Damn! At least Fox News just calls people pinheads and socialists. It's actually very encouraging to know that news media outlets will not make claims like this anymore, because it's dumb as Hell.

Exhibit B:  May 20th, 1856. Senator Charles Sumner gives a speech on the Senate floor full of fiery invective against slavery and southern leadership. He said of one of his esteemed colleagues, "He has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight. I mean the harlot Slavery." Fellow Senator Preston Brooks took particular offense to his language and spoke up about it two days later. With his cane.

Democracy.

He literally beat Senator Sumner half to death until his cane broke from the force of the blows. That's some good old fashioned politics right there.

Speaking of slavery and the mid-1800s...

This was a thing that happened in America

Have people really forgotten that we had a goddamn Civil War based on partisan politics? Because that happened, and it was decidedly more violent than any so-called "blast" politicians throw around at each other today.

Finally, I just want to point out that it's been about thirty-five years since the last time there was a politically-motivated assassination attempt on a politician in the U.S. I'm not counting that business with Reagan because "impressing Jodie Foster" isn't exactly a political movement. Oh, and it's also been a while since people were literally murdered for trying to register voters.

So when you see the terrible divisiveness that is rife in American politics today, please keep in mind that, in general, this is an improvement over the past. A vast improvement.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Tsar Bomba!

For the fifty thousand or so years that modern humans have been around, we've been constantly developing technology, from stone to bronze to iron to steel to electronics, and so on. One of our favorite avenues of technology, as a species, involves utterly ruining the days of people we don't like. In the 20th Century, we perfected the technology of day-ruining with the advent of nuclear weapons.

 

With the onset of the Cold War, the United States and Russia decided it would be a good idea to start a gigantic pissing match to see who could build the biggest nuclear phallic symbol. This contest peaked in the early 1960s, just before the public finally said, "Jesus, guys! You wanna maybe calm down with the radiation-spewing explosions for a minute?" By that time, both countries had achieved astounding and stupidly dangerous results.

America's test series was code-named Operation Castle, and is the source of most nuclear blast footage and photography that we have. The pinnacle of the series was an explosion designated Castle Bravo. Detonated at Bikini Atoll in 1954, Castle Bravo produced a 15 megaton explosion. That's the equivalent of 15 million tons of TNT. This blast was, in fact, much bigger than anticipated, and the fallout gave thousands of nearby residents radiation sickness.

Oh. Our bad.

The Soviet Union, not to be outdone, developed Tsar Bomba. Tsar Bomba, or "Emperor Bomb," is the single most powerful device ever developed by humanity. It was detonated at a remote location in the Arctic Circle in 1961, and resulted in a mind-blowing 50 megaton explosion, more than three times as powerful as the largest U.S. nuclear test. When it was dropped, the explosive fireball measured five miles in diameter, and very nearly engulfed the bomber that had dropped the payload.

Even more impressive was the mushroom cloud, which reached a peak height of about thirty-five goddamn miles. To give you a sense of scale, Mount Everest, the highest point on the entire planet, is a comparatively paltry five and a half miles above sea level. Tsar Bomba's mushroom cloud was over six times higher than Mount freaking Everest. Just let that sink in. The gravity of that fact. We, as a species, created an instrument of destruction that utterly dwarfed the highest mountain on the planet.

Said instrument.

Holy Shit.

Holy Shit, Caligula!

Stop right there! I know what you're thinking. "Oh, Caligula, that crazy Roman Emperor. This one's gonna be all about how insane he was." Perish the thought, my history buff friend, for I have come not to rehash old oddities, but to make you honest-to-god mutter, "Holy shit." That's why I'm here to tell you that Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus, or "Little Boot" to his friends, was likely not insane, and was, in fact, merely a colossal douchebag.

The reports of Caligula's madness are entertaining enough, but they all have one pretty important explanation: Caligula was the first Roman Emperor to be assassinated after the fall of the Republic. He was assassinated by a conspiracy that consisted of a very large portion of Roman nobility. While he was vastly popular amongst the plebeians, who do you think had more sway over written history: the illiterate underclasses or the elite, educated folks in power?

A lot of this shows through the accounts of insanity that Roman historians gave us. One of the most popular stories is of how Caligula said he was going to make his favorite horse a consul. Pretty crazy, right? Silly Little Boot. Horses can't even talk, much less become lawmakers! Why don't you sit quietly in the corner while grownups work with the government?

That sort of attitude is a bit misguided. Caligula probably did promise to make his horse a consul, but it wasn't because he thought the horse would actually be good at it. In fact, he was well aware that a horse would make a terrible legislator. That's the point. He was making a statement, telling the Senate, "I'm so much more important than you, I could put my big dumb horse in a higher office than any of you. So suck it."

Most of the other rumors are what you would expect from a posthumous defamation campaign: sexual depravity, murder, etc. If you look at some of the things that actually got done under his reign, though, the insanity thing starts to lose even more traction. He created new aqueducts to improve the flow of water in Rome. He published public funds, creating unprecedented financial transparency for the Roman government. He brought back democratic elections. One of his political enemies (you know, the ones who called him crazy) said that giving the vote to the lower classes "delighted the rabble, but grieved the sensible."

Now, don't get me wrong, it certainly wasn't all peachy roses under Caligula. He also spent vast sums of money on extravagant personal construction projects. When people spoke out against him, he often circumvented the whole "democracy" thing and just had them put to death. When they got mad at him, he told them they were all dumber and less important than his horse. So that's pretty mean.

Still, the thing that's important to remember is that Rome actually did pretty well under Caligula. When you compare him to some of the other Emperors and statesmen of the era, he really wasn't that bad, and he very likely wasn't actually insane. He was just kind of a jerk. As it turns out, being kind of a jerk can make you seem like a demon-spawned lunatic if the right sources survive the march of time.

The thing that really blows my mind, though, is how trusting we are of the source. The same people who called our own system of government insensible compared to an oligarchy are the ones who called Mr. Boot insane, and we just said, "Okay." Holy shit. That's messed up.

Holy Shit, Meteors!

My wife and I spent several hours late Saturday night/early Sunday morning watching the Perseid meteor shower in our backyard. It got me thinking, "Holy shit, we're seeing chunks of rocks from SPACE, burning up to dust in our atmosphere. I mentioned the mind-boggling vastness of space before. It's really, really, really big. And yet, once a year, because the Swift-Tuttle Comet leaves behind a huge cloud of dust where the Earth goes, we get a reliable view of stuff burning up in our atmosphere. And that's just one of several annual meteor showers.

As it turns out, given how much empty space there is in the universe, there's also a shitload of debris. You can tell by looking at the moon. All those little dents you can see in the surface are from meteor strikes. Over the past few billion years, our neighbor has gathered quite a few of them. "But wait," said the rhetorical device, "If the moon gets hit so often, why don't we?" Well, Mr. Device, there are two answers to your question.

The first answer is that there are many much bigger objects with stronger gravitational pulls in the solar system that attract meteors that may otherwise hit us. Jupiter is the main one. I think we should take time every once in a while to thank Jupiter for that, because we'd probably be pretty dead if it didn't take one for the team so often. The moon helps, too, since it's so close. So thanks, Moon. Way to have your head in the game.

The second answer, though, is that we do get hit by meteors all the time. It's just harder to tell. There are craters caused by meteorites all over the planet, some of them huge. The big ones usually happen out of sight. An unexplained explosion the size of an atomic bomb in Tunguska in 1927 is attributed to a meteor or comet strike.

The small ones, though: all the time. We usually don't notice, but sometimes we do. Sometimes they hit someone's house. If you ever see a strange looking dark rock that's much heavier than other rocks of the same size, put a magnet up to it. If it sticks, you can say to yourself, "Self, this rock came from goddamn space."

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, the universe is big!

"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."

— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

 

I went to the local observatory this weekend, where they have what they call the Planet Walk. The yard surrounding the buildings has 9 inscribed bricks that represent the Sun and the planets of our Solar System (and Pluto). The Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars are pretty close to the center of the grounds, but the rest of the planets are so far out they're tricky to find. It's impossible to make that model to scale in terms of size, because if they did, the Sun would be about the size of a light bulb and some of the planets would be smaller than a grain of sand. You can find some fully scaled models of the solar system online if you want to get a sense of the perspective they're going for.

 

Our Solar System is enormous. That's my point. So big that it's possible to lose track of the entire asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. That's the most densely packed cluster of objects in our solar system, and astronomers came close to losing track of the whole thing shortly after WWII. The trouble is, "densely packed" means something entirely different on the scale of the Solar System. Because the Solar System is huge.

 

 

 

Then we have our galaxy. The image to the left shows you roughly how big the Milky Way Galaxy is. The Sun is not even a single pixel in that image. The Sun is 1.3 million times the size of the Earth, which means the Earth is less than one millionth of one pixel in this image. If the Solar System is big, the Milky Way Galaxy is mind-numbingly massive. But it's almost literally nothing compared to the rest of the universe.

 

 

In 1995, the Hubble Deep Space Telescope took a picture of a single degree of the sky. The area it was looking at is just a tiny portion of the night sky. It's the little L shape in the picture below on the left. What you see is a fraction of a fraction of the observable sky. What it returned was this:

Those aren't stars. They're galaxies. Some of them much, much bigger than ours. There are literally billions and billions of stars in every single one of those specks of light. All of this is contained in a tiny little fleck of the sky. I don't think any other topic could make me "HOLY SHIT" with more sincerity than that image. Now, here's where it gets really crazy.

We're not entirely sure just how big the universe is, because we can't see the whole thing. It's not that we can't build a powerful enough telescope. We probably could, given time and determination. It's just that we can only see things where there is light. Because light has to travel to reach us, we see really goddamn far away things as they existed a really goddamn long time ago. When you get to a certain distance, we'd be looking so far back in time that there was nothing there yet. There is a spherical border you can draw around the Earth that shows exactly how far away we could possibly see anything with the most powerful telescope that will ever exist, because that telescope would show us what the universe looked like before the beginning of time.

I mean, seriously, holy shit.