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We're talking about diversity in the skeptical community again, this time occasioned by some unfortunate and ignorant comments from Michael Shermer about atheism and skepticism being "a guy thing", which drew a predictably sharp response.
As Jacques Rousseau said, it's just barely possible that Shermer might have meant this statement descriptively, rather than normatively. But he then proceeded to dig the hole much deeper with this comment on Twitter which leaves absolutely no room for misinterpretation:
PZ: women & blacks don't want prostrate pity of white males; they just want to be thought of as people. Period. Drop the race/sex obsession.— Michael Shermer (@michaelshermer) December 12, 2012
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Scientists create 'non-cuttable' material 85% less dense than steel
Proteus could someday be used to create extremely strong and lightweight armor and locks.
22 July, 2020
New Atlas / YouTube
Technology & Innovation
- The material's strength comes from the unique arrangement of the ceramic spheres and aluminum of which it's composed.
- This arrangement is found in some biological structures, such as fish scales.
- Proteus is currently awaiting a patent.
<p>How is the Amazonian Arapaimas fish able to block bites from razor-toothed piranha? The fish's scales are extremely tough and flexible, with a hard outer layer, and an inner layer composed of fibers arranged on top of each other in a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouligand_structure" target="_blank">spiral-staircase formation</a>. This unique structure allows for a combination of traits that are uncommon in artificial substances: strength and flexibility.</p><p>Inspired by these kinds of biological structures, a team of researchers used similar design principles to create a "non-cuttable" metallic structure that's only 15 percent as dense as steel. The material, dubbed Proteus, could someday be used to make super-strong and lightweight metal products, like armor and bicycle locks.</p>
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzUwNTUxMy9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY2ODA4NzcxNX0.4T8cfUJ_Jmmv7_RjYGQRCwGW23Ieqn6u8hASC34yT4s/img.png?width=980" id="70685" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="f23ba25b951c72cf16d361398c8fa767" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" alt="close up images of metal structure" />
Stefan Szyniszewski et al.
<p>The team created Proteus by arranging microscopic ceramic spheres in a highly compressible aluminum matrix of foam. When something like an angle grinder cuts into Proteus, the structure promotes a series of forward- and backward-moving vibrations. This movement excites the ceramic spheres, causing them to break down into particles. Then, these particles fill gaps in the foam matrix, making it even harder to cut through the material.</p><img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzUwNTUxMi9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYzNDgxMzkwMH0.Na7WykOxcpKGeWr2i-tJlZjKN6uAiYPLfRG4TzZRqz0/img.png?width=980" id="91d32" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="ae802e3427ac0679e5f50e1497ab70c0" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" alt="powder residue on surfaces" />
Stefan Szyniszewski et al.
<p style="margin-left: 20px;">"Essentially cutting our material is like cutting through a jelly filled with nuggets" lead author Stefan Szyniszewski, assistant professor of applied mechanics in Durham's Department of Engineering, told <a href="https://newatlas.com/materials/proteus-non-cuttable-bike-lock-armor/" target="_blank">New Atlas</a>. "If you get through the jelly you hit the nuggets and the material will vibrate in such a way that it destroys the cutting disc or drill bit."</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"The ceramics embedded in this flexible material are also made of very fine particles which stiffen and resist the angle grinder or drill when you're cutting at speed in the same way that a sandbag would resist and stop a bullet at high speed."</p><p>A video demonstration shows an angle grinder making a slight cut into the surface of the material, but not penetrating much farther. In a study published in <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-65976-0" target="_blank">Nature Scientific Reports</a>, the researchers said that's because the blade didn't make enough contact with the ceramic spheres to produce vibrations strong enough to stop the cutting.</p><span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="6ee364cc01b94a85e49361a07e3a249d"><iframe type="lazy-iframe" data-runner-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fB8xTKeHeco?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"However, as the cutting progressed, it increased the contact region with the disc's rim," they wrote. "Consequently, lateral disc vibrations were generated, which created a dynamic interface with the partially cut ceramic sphere."</p><p>The researchers also noted that a "waterjet cutter was rendered equally ineffective by the curvature of the spheres in the lee side region, which widened the jet cross-section and consequently reduced the jet velocity fifty times according to our estimate." </p><p>Proteus is currently awaiting patent, and it could take years for the material to make it to market. But if these kinds of materials do become widely available, it could open the door for novel technologies — like <a href="“If humans can develop a flexible hierarchical structure that behaves like the collagen layer in the fish scales, better, potentially impermeable, synthetic armors can be made,” Professor Ritchie said." target="_blank">impenetrable armor</a> — that are inspired by biological adaptations millions of years in the making. </p>
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Crazy dreams help us make sense of our memories
A new theory suggests that dreams' illogical logic has an important purpose.
17 November, 2020
Credit: Paul Fleet/Adobe Stock
Mind & Brain
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<p>For a while now, the leading theory about what we're doing when we dream is that we're sorting through our experiences of the last day or so, consolidating some stuff into memories for long-term storage, and discarding the rest. That doesn't explain, though, why our dreams are so often so exquisitely weird.</p><p>A new theory proposes our brains toss in all that crazy as a way of helping us process our daily experiences, much in the way that programmers add unrelated, random-ish nonsense, or "noise," into machine learning data sets to help computers discern useful, predictive patterns in the data they're fed.</p>
Overfitting
<p>The goal of machine learning is to supply an algorithm with a data set, a "training set," in which patterns can be recognized and from which predictions that apply to other unseen data sets can be derived.</p><p>If machine learning learns its training set too well, it merely spits out a prediction that precisely — and uselessly — matches that data instead of underlying patterns within it that could serve as predictions likely to be true of other thus-far unseen data. In such a case, the algorithm describes what the data set <em>is</em> rather than what it <em>means</em>. This is called "overfitting."</p><img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNDc4NTQ4Ni9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY2NDM4NDk1Mn0.bMHbBbt7Nz0vmmQ8fdBKaO-Ycpme5eOCxbjPLEHq9XQ/img.jpg?width=980" id="5049a" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="f9a6823125e01f4d69ce13d1eef84486" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />Big Think
The value of noise
<p>To keep machine learning from becoming too fixated on the specific data points in the set being analyzed, programmers may introduce extra, unrelated data as noise or corrupted inputs that are less self-similar than the real data being analyzed.</p><p>This noise typically has nothing to do with the project at hand. It's there, metaphorically speaking, to "distract" and even confuse the algorithm, forcing it to step back a bit to a vantage point at which patterns in the data may be more readily perceived and not drawn from the specific details within the data set.</p><p>Unfortunately, overfitting also occurs a lot in the real world as people race to draw conclusions from insufficient data points — xkcd has a fun example of how this can happen with <a href="https://xkcd.com/1122/" target="_blank">election "facts."</a></p><p>(In machine learning, there's also "underfitting," where an algorithm is too simple to track enough aspects of the data set to glean its patterns.)</p><img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNDc4NTQ5My9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYyMDE5NjY1M30.iS2bq7WEQLeS34zNFPnXwzAZZn9blCyI-KVuXmcHI6o/img.jpg?width=980" id="cd486" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="c49cfbbffceb00e3f37f00e0fef859d9" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />Credit: agsandrew/Adobe Stock
Nightly noise
<p>There remains a lot we don't know about how much storage space our noggins contain. However, it's obvious that if the brain remembered absolutely everything we experienced in every detail, that would be an awful lot to remember. So it seems the brain consolidates experiences as we dream. To do this, it must make sense of them. It must have a system for figuring out what's important enough to remember and what's unimportant enough to forget rather than just dumping the whole thing into our long-term memory.</p><p>Performing such a wholesale dump would be an awful lot like overfitting: simply documenting what we've experienced without sorting through it to ascertain its meaning.</p><p>This is where the new theory, the <a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/2007.09560.pdf" target="_blank">Overfitting Brain Hypothesis</a> (OBH) proposed by Erik Hoel of Tufts University, comes in. Suggesting that perhaps the brain's sleeping analysis of experiences is akin to machine learning, he proposes that the illogical narratives in dreams are the biological equivalent of the noise programmers inject into algorithms to keep them from overfitting their data. He says that this may supply just enough off-pattern nonsense to force our brains to see the forest and not the trees in our daily data, our experiences.</p><p>Our experiences, of course, are delivered to us as sensory input, so Hoel suggests that dreams are sensory-input noise, biologically-realistic noise injection with a narrative twist:</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"Specifically, there is good evidence that dreams are based on the stochastic percolation of signals through the hierarchical structure of the cortex, activating the default-mode network. Note that there is growing evidence that most of these signals originate in a top-down manner, meaning that the 'corrupted inputs' will bear statistical similarities to the models and representations of the brain. In other words, they are derived from a stochastic exploration of the hierarchical structure of the brain. This leads to the kind structured hallucinations that are common during dreams."</p><p>Put plainly, our dreams are just realistic enough to engross us and carry us along, but are just different enough from our experiences —our "training set" — to effectively serve as noise.</p><p>It's an interesting theory.</p><p>Obviously, we don't know the extent to which our biological mental process actually resemble the comparatively simpler, man-made machine learning. Still, the OBH is worth thinking about, maybe at least more worth thinking about than whatever <em>that</em> was last night.</p>
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Is Christianity rooted in psychedelic rituals?
In "The Immortality Key," Brian Muraresku speculates that the Eucharist could have once been more colorful.
17 November, 2020
Credit: Mads Schmidt Rasmussen / Unsplash
Culture & Religion
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<p>Brian Muraresku wants to be very clear: the immortality key is <em>not </em>psychedelics. He's referring to the concept of "dying before dying," a mystical, near-death state spiritual figures from around the world—and in his book's case, possibly early Christians—entered into during ritual. As the author stated during our recent interview,</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"Certainly, psychedelics seem to be an awfully fast-acting, reliable way to enter into that state—that state between life and death. But it's not the only one, and I want to be very, very clear about that."</p><p>Still, "The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion With No Name" is <em>kind of</em> about psychedelics. The main thesis of Muraresku's exceptional investigative work: the modern Eucharist is a placebo variation of a psychedelic brew that originally represented the body and blood of Christ, as was likely practiced during the secret Eleusinian Mysteries. Unlike other religions and mythologies (which acknowledge prior influences), Christian leaders have remained steadfast in the assertion that Christianity emerged whole-cloth as a unique (and, in the eyes of believers, <em>true</em>) faith. </p><p>That's just not how religion works. Nothing is created in a vacuum. </p><p>This power play—one that, Muraresku writes, potentially demonized psychedelics and ousted them from spiritual rituals, as well as the keepers of ancient ritualistic secrets, women—has forced us to attribute the foundations of Western civilization to Christianity. The real lineage belongs to Greece. Muraresku, who holds a degree in Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, spent 12 years investigating this book due to his longstanding love of the Classics, which he believes to be the West's actual inspiration. </p><p>When beginning his studies, Muraresku had Homer in one hand and the Bible in the other. He realized these works addressed the same communities. Paul's letters, which comprise 21 of 27 books in the New Testament, were addressed to "Greek speakers in Greek places." While the roots of Christianity are in Galilee and Jerusalem, the seeds were planted in Corin, Ephesus, and Rome. And if the Greek language underlies early Christian thought, then so do the philosophy and rituals. </p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"Would you study the Torah with somebody who didn't know Hebrew? Would you study the Quran with somebody who didn't know Arabic? It's really hard to make a left turn into Christianity and divorce everything that came before, which is not what happened, obviously."</p>
The Connection Psychedelics Have to Early Christianity, Christmas
<span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="72275b24cf5d5ef9a42648bd565da0e0"><iframe type="lazy-iframe" data-runner-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/XS5qjEXS6oM?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span><p>Muraresku was drawn into this research due to the mystical concept of dying before dying, as expressed during the Mysteries of Eleusis. He uncovered parallel narratives while conducting research with God's librarian in the Vatican Secret Archives—a research trip few people ever have an opportunity to experience.</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"This is something preserved in St. Paul's monastery, for example: <em>if you die before you die, you won't die when you die</em>. That's the key. It's not psychedelics; it's not drugs. It's this concept of navigating the liminal space between what you and I are doing right now, and dreaming, and death. In that state, the mystics tell us, is the potential to grasp a very different view of reality."</p><p>Something funny happened on the way to the Archives, however. Muraresku, who has never taken a psychedelic drug, read about terminally-ill patients <a href="https://maps.org/news/multimedia-library/3012-how-psychedelic-drugs-can-help-patients-face-death" target="_blank">having a similar revelation</a> after ingesting psilocybin. "Dying before dying" succinctly describes what they felt; the overwhelming sensations prepared them to actually die with confidence and grace. Could this be the same experience discovered by initiates at Eleusis and, later, early Christians? </p><p>The key to immortality might be dying before dying, and psychedelics appear to be one method for unlocking this mystery. </p><p>Muraresku spends the bulk of 400 pages chasing down archaeological and scriptural evidence for spiked wine. The wine and wafer of today is a far cry from the <em>kukeon</em> of the ancient Greeks, drunk by pilgrims, who were given the title <em>epoptes</em>, "the one who has seen it all." That's a heavy ask for a grape. </p><p>But if you were to mix that grape with blue water lily (with its psychoactive compounds, apomorphine and nuciferin), henbane, lizards—ancestral food choices put Brooklyns hipster to shame—or ergot, the fungal disease that gives LSD its kick, you might just "see it all." As Muraresku points out, the Greek language is descriptively rich and extensive, yet these philosophers somehow never invented a word for "alcohol." Their chalices weren't for wine alone. </p><img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNDc4MjY1Ny9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY1Mzg3NTQ4Nn0.FojP3fp6UiX2XE1nQl7p_NaXwU1-KAbExMW4Fy8M_nc/img.jpg?width=1245&coordinates=0%2C144%2C0%2C104&height=700" id="d808e" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="4a039d972c4d147d362039d780bb31b6" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
The Telesterion at the Archaeological site of Eleusis ( or "Elefsis) or "Elefsina", Attica, Greece
Credit: Iraklis Milas / Adobe Stock
<p>While he calls psychedelics "just one, perhaps very tiny piece" of early Christian rituals, it could be an essential one. Sadly, archaeochemistry isn't the most funded discipline, especially after asking the Vatican to hand over guarded relics in hopes of discovering trace amounts of psychedelics. And yet, even with those restrictions, Muraresku gains access to the Vatican Secret Archives and jet sets with a sympathetic Father Francis through the Louvre and Rome in search of potential connections in the literature and art.</p><p>There are plenty. While the gospel writers were busy writing what would become the world's most lasting bestseller, Dioscorides was penning his unforgettable recipe book, "Da meteria medica." The five-volume drug manual's influence lasted for 1,500 years before Renaissance botanists usurped his reign. Regardless, Dioscorides included cocktails spiked with plants, herbs, and toxins, some of which inspire a hallucinogenic—some would say religious—sentiment.</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"It's no mistake that the Eucharist is described as the 'drug of immortality' by the early Church fathers because there was this sense of really sophisticated botanical understanding that goes all the way back to Homer. Obviously, it goes back a lot further, and so part of the reason I wrote the book is to show people that within Western civilization—at its roots, in fact—is this very pharmacopoeia. This tradition was certainly there, and it begs the question of how prevalent and widespread it really was."</p><p>Add to this already riveting tale the fact that the gatekeepers of Eleusis were women—a practice Christianity abandoned. Women were likely the distributors of the spiked beverages that helped initiates "see it all." Modern precedent exists, though not in American Christianity. The Western world was introduced to psilocybin after R Gordon Wasson sat in on a ceremony led by the <em>curandera</em> María Sabina. Likewise, ayahuasca is called "godmother" for a reason.</p><p>We live in a world that went from honoring goddesses to hunting witches, though we shouldn't glorify ancient Greece. The first democracy didn't allow women to vote and likely didn't let them partake in epic plays. Men performed as women in the Tragedies. Highborn women often become slaves in these plays, such as with Cassandra, Hecuba, and Tecmessa. Misogyny is ancient. While Greek city folk were jacked up on testosterone, Eleusis offered a different landscape. </p><p>Regardless, Christian leaders exiled women from both leadership and ritual. While in the Archives, Muraresku found evidence of at least 45,000 so-called witches being executed, with "countless more" tortured or imprisoned. The patriarchy initiated a pattern:</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"[The leadership] wasn't just trying to rid Christianity of folk healers. It was trying to erase a system of knowledge that had survived for centuries in the shadows." </p>Conspirituality interview with Brian Muraresku
<span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="667ddf5ba30218a0baefe066cf36c4f2"><iframe type="lazy-iframe" data-runner-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0aogj-08AMo?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span><p>The knowledge was the pharmacological expertise these women had amassed over untold generations. The two banes of the Church—mind-altering substances that afford the initiate a mindset comparable (or, perhaps exactly akin) to prophets and sages and women, the holders of the Secrets—were swept up in one millennia-long cover-up. As Muraresku succinctly phrases it, "the Catholic Church started the War on Drugs." Perhaps the War on Women, too.</p><p>Perhaps they're two aspects of the same war. </p><p>Interestingly, this 12-year-long odyssey only deepened Muraresku's Catholicism, which is rooted in the Jesuit tradition. As he says, Christianity—a religion that was a cult for over 300 years before being catapulted onto the global stage—has always evolved. Could the Church possibly change again and offer the psychedelic sacrament that might lie at the heart of the religion? Is another Reformation possible? </p><p>As Muraresku concludes during our talk, each attempt to get back to the roots, beginning with Martin Luther and continuing right through to Pope Francis, is an analysis of the origins of the faith. To know your history is to understand where you're heading. Muraresku would like to see another step forward. </p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"There was no monolithic Christianity. Just like today, you look around and see 33,000 denominations of Christianity—a few of which include psychedelics as their sacrament, such as the Santo Daime or the Native American Church, which has some Christian syncretism to it. The possibility of a psychedelic sacrament in antiquity is not laughable. In fact, it's quite plausible according to some of the literature and data that's just beginning to emerge on the scientific front. </p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"When I look and see Hellenic Christianity that was very much at the roots of the Catholic Church, and the more I found that Greek influence underneath the Vatican—in some cases, literally, in the catacombs—the more I began to really love and appreciate what this was all about. The more I read the Greek and the more evidence that I see, the more in love with Christianity I become. Now, it might not be some people's definition of Christianity today, but again, if you just step back and take a very honest look at the Greek of the New Testament and the Greek landscape in which it emerged, it's a really powerful statement."</p><p>--<br></p><p><em>Stay in touch with Derek on <a href="http://www.twitter.com/derekberes" target="_blank">Twitter</a> and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/DerekBeresdotcom" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Facebook</a>. His new book is</em> "<em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08KRVMP2M?pf_rd_r=MDJW43337675SZ0X00FH&pf_rd_p=edaba0ee-c2fe-4124-9f5d-b31d6b1bfbee" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Hero's Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy</a>."</em></p>
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Coronavirus
Using machine learning to track the pandemic’s impact on mental health
Textual analysis of social media posts finds users' anxiety and suicide-risk levels are rising, among other negative trends.
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