Prognostications, Ahoy!

Whitby.  We've heard of the place, on the coast of Yorkshire, home of the madhouse in Dracula, the place with the lightning, the cemetery; the scene of that great Gothic battle against evil.  One imagines it a dreary place, lashed with wind and weather, with dark clouds clinging to the rocky shores.

But Whitby is actually somewhat of a tourist place, and always has been; a place for the people of northern Yorkshire to go to the seaside, an old fishing port (where Captain Cook learned his trade), connected to the North York Moors, where from Georgian times until the present, people go to walk and look.  And Whitby jet, mined there since Roman times, was very popular among the Victorians.

George Merryweather was a doctor living in Whitby, an honorary curator of the Whitby Philosophical Society in the mid-19th century.  His habit of inventing things, so common among the people of the day, led to his invention of the Platina Lamp, a long-burning light source:

"In a communication from George Merryweather, Esq. to Professor Jameson, dated Edinburgh March 5th, 1831, it is proposed to extend the aphlogistic platina lamp, by constructing the body of the lamp, of tin large enough to contain a quart or more of alcohol.  This will be sufficient to keep the platina in a state of constant ignition for thirteen or fourteen days and nights.  Such a lamp, while entirely devoid of glare, affords sufficient light to shew the face of a watch in the dark of night.  ... if it be connected with an unfailing reservoir of alcohol, the lamp may be ignited for years.  The spongy platina does not appear to be, in the least, deteriorated by being kept in a state of constant ignition."

-- The American Journal of Science and Arts, Volume 20, under "Miscellanies"

 However, the thing which Mr. Merryweather became truly famous for was his "Atmospheric, Electromagnetic Telegraph, conducted by Animal Instinct," or, more shortly, his Tempest Prognosticator," which he built for the Great Exhibition of 1851.  It is a beautiful structure, with a bell at the top designed to look like the dome at St. Pauls.  Around the bottom are placed a dozen glass bottles; threading from tiny hammers around the edge of the bell are threads, which connect to a piece of whalebone just inside the neck of each bottle.  Inside each bottle is poured an inch of rainwater and then -- oh happy home! -- each bottle is occupied by a leech.  A common, ordinary surgical leech.

Being a doctor, Merryweather had observed that medical leeches responded to barometric pressure or electrical charge in the air, or whatever it is that allows smaller animals to know when bad weather is afoot.  The leeches' response was to climb -- probably a good response for water-dwelling creatures just before a rain, so that they don't get washed away.  So when Merryweather's leeches climbed to the top of the bottle, they nudged the piece of whalebone, which caused the string to move and ring the bell.  It's not clear, but it appears that the more the bell rang before a storm, the worse the weather to come.

Interestingly, Merryweather knew that his observations would come under question.  He set up a system, using the incredibly efficient postal system of the day, wherein he would post a letter to Henry Belcher, President of the Whitby Literary and Philosophical Society whenever his Prognosticator gave him warning of an impending storm.  Because the postal system delivered mail several times a day, the letters were postmarked with both date and time, proving that he had predicted the storm before it happened.  He did this for all of 1850, and his Prognosticator was surprisingly effective.

The thing that is interesting to me about this invention, which few people actually talk about, is the way in which Mr. Merryweather was working to span that growing gap between the natural world and the newly-ascendant scientific world, using "instinct" as an accurate gauge for something as practical as weather-prediction.  Interestingly, however, meteorology was a very appropriate battleground for this clash, as the scientific method did not always work so well with the chaotic ways that weather systems worked:

"…Faced with problems in constructing meteorological knowledge from the weight of precision observation, meteorologists turned their attention towards kinds of knowledge that stood outside conventional methods and instruments, however extensively situated, however precise and continuous.  The reputation of popular weather wisdom explained how meteorology persistently remained a key site for attacks on the dogmatism of scientific culture, and it forced meteorologists to consider the problem of evidence that seemed to escape the forms of number, weight, and measure." 
-- Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology, by Katharine Anderson

In other words, meterologists couldn't simply get by predicting whether people would die at sea based on simple measurements; they had to rely, in some part, on other things they found to be true:

"Eccentric as it may appear, the Tempest Prognosticator embodied widely shared assumptions about forms of knowledge, instruments, and meteorological science.  Its plausibility was based on two key perceptions: first, the precision and infallibility of sensations; and second, the importance of instruments to modern knowledge.  Both are crucial for understanding the relationship of weather wisdom and scientific meteorology.  The complex instinctive behavior of some "lower" forms of life modeled a natural form of automatic precision."
 -- Katharine Anderson, above

I had never really thought before how much the battleground between accepted wisdom/magic and science was fought to a much later date in meteorology, but it makes sense: for, if there's one thing Chaos Theory and satellite technology have taught us, it's that weather is a fickle, far-ranging thing, and telling sailors whether to go risk their lives merely on a barometer is something no one is completely comfortable doing.  Anyone attempting to predict the weather, even today, is likely to come under criticism and even scorn when their predictions appear to be caged in ambivalence; so Merryweather must have thought he was onto something wonderful.  He even tried to convince meterologists that his leeches could be hooked up to a telegraph system, with a minimum of difference in design; but not surprisingly, they did not take the bait.  They already had their feet set on a road in which animal instinct was discounted, and would continue to be discounted, until the late 20th century.

(The Tempest Prognosticator is now kept at the Whitby Museum)


Read more about the Prognosticator

If Only I Had A Fourth-Dimensional Mirror

Since I've moved house, I've been looking through all my old clothes that have been stashed away for years. I'm one of those people who find really cool clothing and then when they look ridiculous I stash them away until they are reasonable to wear again. It's surprising how many clothes actually do work fifteen years later (as long as they're not bubble gum fashion statements).

One thing that has been striking me over and over recently is the shadow-me that I seem to live with. By this I mean, my younger self, which hangs around in these clothes and in photographs. A tall, slender girl with blonde hair who lacked the confidence to express her opinions. I pull out dresses with the 26 inch waist and think, who was that person? Why didn't she speak up? And I still feel her inside me somewhere, still anxious about things, still idealistic, and she's wondering "what the heck happened to me! I want my body back!" It's like being schizophrenic.


I think I blogged somewhere in Croatia about palimpsests, those places where the information from older times gets layered over newer information. Lately, I'm thinking that people, as creatures who live and grow through time, are really just living palimpsests. Our older selves are simply layered versions of our younger selves. Take a look, sometime, at an older person's face: you'll see every experience they ever had, etched into the lines there. If the person has had a bitter life, their face will show it; and people who live their lives well have a certain beauty, laid into their faces like a mosaic or like those poles with the layers and layers of posters stuck to them.


Have you ever seen or read Flatland (my favorite is the wonderful 1965 animated version, with members of Beyond the Fringe doing voices)? It's about some 2-dimensional people (squares, triangles, etc.) who meet a sphere as it passes through their space. The sphere, as it passes through, appears to grow and shrink as different parts of it are bisected by the 2-dimensional plane, and the denizens of that world think that it's only a circle which appears and disappears and fluxuates in size.


As you can see in the video above (which I found after writing most of this post), we are all multi-dimensional creatures, made huge with the vastness of time's dimension, yet seeing only the three-dimensional slice of ourselves in each moment. The younger me, the older me, the me-that-is-to-be, they are all only aspects of the wholeness of myself. So I really am only looking at a part of the whole when I wonder who that person is/was/will be.

What is the shape of that whole, really? I don't mean just in terms of our bodies moving through space; I mean, who are we? What drives us? How does that inform the multidimensional self?

Up to about twenty, we are growing so much that we can't keep up with our own changes, and as a result every time we meet ourselves we are totally different. We get used to this flux: it's all we've ever known, and we don't generally have the agency to influence the world, so we take it in stride.


However, by the twenties, then, are about being Finished -- about Being A Grownup. People in their late teens and twenties are busy reveling in doing all those things they've looked forward to doing when they became A Grownup: going out to clubs, eating whatever, drinking, staying up late, taking terrible care of their bodies: in other words, going where they want to when they want to -- and reading all those banned books. They smoke, they swear, they talk about exciting new things. They try stuff. They are busy devouring the world and showing everyone how they are Not A Kid.


In their thirties, people tend not to need to prove this point so much, and often settle down a bit, getting involved in their job or family life and generally feeling youthful but settled. Their bodies are still good, their friends are smarter, they are deepening intellectually. Life is good.

Then a weird thing happens in the forties and/or fifties. Suddenly their bodies are betraying them; weird physical anomalies appear as if overnight, literally -- one day they're not there, and the next day they are: weight gain, strange fallen bits, wrinkles and bags and puffy bits you never imagined on yourself, all materialize, one by one, in an avalanche of hellish change. By the time you're sixty or seventy, perhaps you're used to it. I don't know; I'm not there yet. However, it's clear that some people go down fighting all the way.


I used to look forward to getting crow's feet. I thought getting old wasn't such a bad thing, and looked forward to someday being one of those leathery old ladies full of cool stories (as opposed to the unmarked, unremarked face which was my youthful lot). Then one day, for reasons which aren't important but were temporary, I woke up and the space above my eyelids had fallen down over my eyes: I could feel my eyelashes holding them up, and when I looked in the mirror I almost screamed. My eyes had gone from the familiar crooked, normal-sized, expressive and not-ugly eyes to some horrid small and mean-looking ones, the eyes of a stranger. I'd swear it wasn't even me looking out of them.

In that moment, it suddenly occurred to me that this might be what my eyes might look like in old age. Suddenly I was a lot less keen. Where were my same eyes with the crow's feet? Would my eye-skin do this, simply sag over my eyes until I was drowned, lost, subsumed in someone else's face, getting up every morning and looking in the mirror and wondering where the me that I had looked at for years had gone? Was I doomed to look mean forever?

Luckily, the awful swelling passed, but it definitely shook me up.

I remember my 90-something-year-old great aunt -- the one who was married to the painter, who made amazing clothes out of curtains and wrote poetry and called you "Darling" in a wonderful deep voice -- I remember her telling my mom, "You're always sixteen inside, darling." She would flirt with young men and get away with it, because she was so dynamic. The young men always responded -- they were fascinated by her. She was as wrinkly and lacking in hair as the next old lady: but she carried herself with drama, wore interesting clothes, and was a marvelous conversationalist.

The thing is, I always aspired to be her. I thought I wanted to be that cool old lady when I was older. But I didn't realize how hard the journey might be -- to go on keeping hold of who you are when the outside of you changes so much. I'm already one of those people whose outsides and insides have never matched: I used to look in shop windows when I walked by, not because I was vain, but because I could never get used to the idea that that person was me. Initially, it was because I couldn't believe that I was fully-grown and had all the grownup bits; but later, it was more to do with not believing that the person with the blonde mane and the unfinished-looking face was really me. It simply didn't seem like an outward expression of who I was. And yet, as the years go by, you get used to that outer self and you come to see it as a favorite sweater, something comfortable that you wear every day and even dress up with accessories -- like clothes, for example (In my case, later, when I had a few more lines in my face, I dyed my hair red and became much more satisfied with the match between inner and outer selves).

Eventually, however, the sweater gets baggy -- and that's when you suddenly realize you're stuck wearing it even if you find you don't love it so much anymore.

I'm thinking more and more that what you have to do is stop thinking of it as if you are an unhappy consumer who can't buy a new sweater (although many people actually try to get the old one retailored); what you have to do is think of it -- all of it -- as a whole. It's not so much that the outer you has worn out, while the inner you is inside screaming to get out; rather, all of those incarnations of you -- the child, the nubile young thing, the virile strong young man, the parent, the middle aged person, whatever guises you have inhabited along the way -- all of those are actually still there. Literally. You just can't see them anymore.


Wikipedia informs me that although I was taught that "Time Is The Fourth Dimension," in most mathematical models there are many different spatial dimensions, and time is not a part of these dimensional spaces. However, there is a type of space (or spacetime) called Minkowski space: "In physics and mathematics, Minkowski space or Minkowski spacetime (named after the mathematician Hermann Minkowski) is the mathematical setting in which Einstein's theory of special relativity is most conveniently formulated. In this setting the three ordinary dimensions of space are combined with a single dimension of time to form a four-dimensional manifold for representing a spacetime.

"In theoretical physics, Minkowski space is often contrasted with Euclidean space. While a Euclidean space has only spacelike dimensions, a Minkowski space also has one timelike dimension." Et voila! I can still talk about time like it's a fourth dimension. Mathematicians may scoff, but it's just damned easier this way, so I'll willfully stick to it for this post.


Source: Hubblesite.org
In some version of Minkowski spacetime, then, your tired old body might look like a Nebula photo from the Hubble telescope, or like the best palimpsest you could never imagine. You might find that all the joyous moments shine among the multitudinous wholeness like stars, or that each care that etched its line on your face was represented by a thousand tiny vacillations, like the delicate frills on a jellyfish. You might find that all your many travels make you into a great creature so tangled and enfolded in the Earth that the two have become inextricable. Which gives a new meaning to the "personal responsibility" part of ecological stewardship.

Looking at the women I know who have reached the crone age successfully, I think to myself "it is possible." It's possible to move through the baggy patches with grace, building a beautiful whole. The secret is to live with joy, and the wrinkles in your 3-D self will hopefully layer themselves over the droopy eyes until the palimpsest of happiness embeds itself in your polished old skin so your eyes can't look mean, especially when you look at them in all four dimensions and see who you were, where you went, who you became, and all the many layers and scars and travels and experiences in between, becoming something so vast, so world-encompassing and beautiful that you can't help but be proud.

It's A Yawn, It's A Sneer

No, it's the Flehmen Response.


Have you ever wondered why your horse or your cat gives that "gurning" face after smelling something intensely? I did; I thought it was something in the smell that made my cat react that way, as if she didn't like it -- except she kept going back to it again. It seemed like she was a glutton for punishment.


Now I find it wasn't that at all: she was exhibiting the Flehmen Response, a way of smelling that does not involve the nose.


What it does involve is an organ inside the roof of the mouth called the vomeronasal organ, otherwise known as the Jacobson's organ. The "gurning" face (or, in the case of goats and horses, the weird lip-lifting) is actually a way of getting air to circulate inside the mouth so that the vomeronasal organ can pick up molecules of the scent in question. It helps the animal see what kind of scent it is, really, and gives them more information about the source of the scent.

Generally, the scents that cause this kind of interest are things that contain pheremones or other compounds that tell the animal about other animals, either of their own species or, in the case of cats, those of prey. Curiously, it is believed to be the basis of the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland.


"Flehming allows the animals to determine several factors, including the presence or absence of estrus, the physiological state of the animal, and how long ago the animal passed by. This particular response is recognizable, for example, in stallions when smelling the urine of a mare in heat." [wiki]

This is a small fact, something you can bring out in odd moments to impress your friends; but as an activity it rarely fails in comic charm. Here is a video of a pony with the Flehmen Response in action:



Lastly, I'm not certain the video below is a flehmen response (if so it's a very lively one), but it is pretty funny.



You can also type "Flehmen Response" into Google Images and see what you get: a veritable rogue's gallery of weird facial tics.

Hubble: Deep Field

My friend Gwyan just sent me this and I actually can't find many words to describe the effect it had on me. There was a moment, and I will let you find that moment, when I caught my breath and actually became too emotional to speak. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. It is, quite literally, awesome.

A Bit of Soap

Warning: one slightly gruesome picture, below, about halfway down)

There is a story in my head, certainly a conflation of two different stories. In one of the stories, a man who endowed some institution stipulated in his will that he should be preserved upon his death and seated in a cabinet in the foyer of the institution, so that he might oversee the comings and goings of the people who came after him. The other story involved a fat man who had been buried in just the right conditions that he had been turned entirely to soap. I pictured him, my conflated man, sitting in a chair in a cabinet somewhere with a suit on, a solid block of man-seeming soap, watching with saponified eyes the comings and goings of his modern brethren.


The man in the cabinet turns out to be Jeremy Bentham, an influential London philosopher (and the founder of Utilitarianism) who had his body preserved and set into a cabinet he called his "auto-icon" (see more here). The soap-man of my conflation, on the other hand, is actually a man who was dug up at the same time as the Soap Lady who resides at the Mütter Museum, that holiest of weird medical museums. Both bodies had been disinterred somewhere in Philadelphia, possibly as part of a street-widening project.

"Due to the unusual nature of the two bodies, Dr. Joseph Leidy, a prominent physician, scientist and professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, was notified. It is unclear how Dr. Leidy acquired the cadavers, but he eventually presented them to two separate museums." (link) The woman ended up in the Mutter Museum, and the man went to the Smithsonian. Unfortunately, the man is no longer on display, but the Soap Lady can still be seen, for a fee.


My early vision of a person converted into a solid block of soap, liable to dissolve in floods, is not actually accurate either. Adipocere, otherwise known as grave wax or mortuary wax, "is a water-insoluble material consisting mostly of saturated fatty acids. It is formed by the slow hydrolysis of fats in decomposing material such as a human cadaver by action of anaerobic bacteria...Corpses of infants and overweight persons are particularly prone to adipocere transformation. Adipocere formation begins within a month of death, and in the absence of air it can persist for centuries."

This process, called saponification (also used to refer to the reaction which makes common soap) happens in cold, moist environments where the lack of oxygen keeps aerobic bacteria and other agents of dissolution from doing their work. My guess is that the anaerobic bacteria actually live off some byproduct, such as the alcohol which comes from the conversion of fats to soap, and so they actually precipitate the transformation to that end.


In regular soap, fats or oils are boiled with an alkali agent, such as lye or wood-ash, and the resulting mess which comes from this combination of heat and pH is a solid substance with a curious molecular makeup. On one end of the molecule is hydrophilic, meaning it likes water: it can be dissolved by water. The other end of the same molecule is hydrophobic, meaning it doesn't like water, and this end is actually able to dissolve grease molecules. "The hydrophobic portion (made up of a long hydrocarbon chain) dissolves dirt and oils, while the ionic end dissolves in water. Therefore, it allows water to remove normally-insoluble matter by emulsification." [wiki]

In other words, it magically bridges the gap between two universes: that of oil and water, which we all know do not normally intermingle.


Interestingly, one of the beneficial uses of hot-fat saponification is in the kitchen:

"Fires involving cooking fats and oils... burn hotter than other typical combustible liquids, rendering a standard class B extinguisher ineffective. Such fires should be extinguished with a wet chemical extinguisher. Extinguishers of this type are designed to extinguish cooking fats and oils through saponification. The extinguishing agent rapidly converts the burning substance to a non-combustible soap. This process is endothermic, meaning it absorbs thermal energy from its surroundings, decreasing the temperature and eliminating the fire." [wiki]


In the ancient world, many people did not, apparently use soap for bathing. The earliest form of soap, made by boiling fat with ashes, was probably only used for washing Babylonians' clothing; and there is some evidence that the Phoenicians were producing it, probably as a hair pomade, in about 600 BC. The Greeks and other mediterranean ancients, commonly cleaned themselves by rubbing with scented oils and then scraping themselves with a metal strigil, bringing off the dead skin and dirt with the oil (this is making a comeback now as a "modern" beauty method).

The Celts, on the other hand, seem to have had soap from a relatively early period. While the Romans had baths, and seem to have looked down on soap's crude smelliness, the Celts may have had a cruder approach to cleaning altogether. When one is crouched in a cold stream, in a cold country, one tries to get on with the job as quickly and efficiently as possible.


Castile soap came to London in the 1500s, the first true hard soap to be seen in those parts; it was made by boiling wood ash and olive oil, and then adding brine to make the soap float to the surface. By adding salt, the soap separates itself more thoroughly from the lye and the other byproducts of the soap-making - creating a hard, white soap which grows harder with time (without losing its whiteness).

Which is interesting, because people who have observed saponified corpses have often compared them with this kind of soap. Sir Thomas Browne describe it this way:

"In a Hydropicall body ten years buried in a Church-yard, we met with a fat concretion, where the nitre of the Earth, and the salt and lixivious liquor of the body, had coagulated large lumps of fat, into the consistence of the hardest castle-soap: wherof part remaineth with us."

In Lake Crescent, Washington, a murdered woman's body came to the surface of the lake three years after her death in 1937, and a witness said, "She had the consistency of... Ivory soap."

The Higgins children, from the Hopetoun Quarry murder case, Edinburgh

But how could a body, submerged in water, be acted upon by anaerobic bacteria? One would think the oxygen in the water would preclude it. A very likely answer is that there is a thermocline, a layering effect where the upper, changeable parts of a body of water separate out from the deeper, colder, temperature-stable areas; these remain undisturbed for long periods of time. This means the oxygen mixing that goes on at the upper reaches of the water doesn't make its way to the lower reaches. I suspect the cold environment and the stillness, also mean that any aerobic bacteria use up extra oxygen until there isn't enough to support more oxygen-thirsty life forms.

So when Hallie Illingworth's body was pulled out of that cold Washington lake, she looked almost perfect. "She was full formed as in life; what had been an attractive woman; even her mass of auburn hair seemed strangely natural, almost untouched in appearance by the watery grave from which she had just been removed." She was white as marble, almost shiny in her perfection. If she were a saint, it would be safe that she would be designated incorruptible.


Grave wax (adipocere) tends to be a strange substance, smooth and, when it's had time, relatively hard and brittle (not always; it depends on the conditions). The Soap Lady is considered so fragile that they don't dare move her unless absolutely necessary. It tends to begin on the outside of the corpse - the longer the body has been interred, the deeper the saponification penetrates. This has led to some rather extraordinary mistakes. Augustus Granville, for example, in 1821, performed the first really scientific dissection of an egyptian mummy, taking six weeks to unwrap it and examine every inch of the remarkably beautifully-preserved corpse. He very accurately surmised a number of things about her: that she was in her mid-50s, that she had been quite well-fed, that she had an ovarian tumor. However, in examining the body he found she had been preserved in a way not described by Greek historian Herodotus' 5th-century eyewitness accounts - that being the record which Granville was working from.

There were, according to Herodotus, two ways of preserving a corpse: the cheap way and the expensive way. Both ways involved removing the organs from the corpse - and yet, Granville's mummy's organs were still almost entirely intact and in place.

"Granville concluded that the embalmers had used a method Herodotus had missed. One clue to the technique was the softness of the skin and muscles and the pliable joints. Another was the presence throughout of a waxy substance, which Granville believed was a mix of beeswax and bitumen. He deduced that the body "must have been plunged into a vessel containing a liquefied mixture of wax and bitumen and kept there for some hours or days, over a gentle fire." He tried the treatment on stillborn babies. It seemed to work." [from New Scientist's article on same]

Granville decided to give a scientific presentation of his findings, but was unable to resist his flamboyant urges, and made his presentation in a room lit entirely by candles made from the "wax" he scraped from the corpse. It wasn't until Egyptologist John Taylor joined the British Museum in the late 1980s that Granville's sample cases were found again, and the "wax" discovered to be the saponified flesh of the mummy herself.


Making candles of the flesh of the dead is not unheard-of, however, though it is usually done more intentionally than Granville's dubious debut. The Hand of Glory, for example, is a sort of grisly candle holder made from the cut-off hand of a hanged man. Take a candle made from the fat of a (possibly the same) hanged man and put it into the grasp of, or attach it to the fingers of, the hand. Now light the wick (preferably made from the hair of the dead man), and all the people in the house will sleep without waking while you plunder their treasure. It cannot be put out by any means except dousing with fresh milk, and there are many stories (rather startlingly like urban myths in their repetition and style) of intelligent chamber-maids putting out the candle and waking the house when the thieves were busy.

The recipe for preparing the hand, which must be cut from the corpse while it is still hanging in the gibbet, goes as such:

"Squeeze the blood out of the hand; embalm it in a shroud and steep it in a solution of saltpetre, salt and pepper for two weeks and then dry in the sun. The other essential for its use is a candle made from hanged man's fat, wax and Lapland sesame." (This according to the Whitby Museum in Whitby, England, where such a hand is housed. There is also, supposedly, one in the museum in Walsall, England).

Hangings these days are rare, and when executed are rather brief and hygenic. It is hard to imagine there would be an opportunity for cutting off the hand while the body is still in the gallows (since gibbets are no longer used, this would be your only option). Still, it is tempting to consider a discreet proviso in one's will about where you will be buried - in the hopes, someday, that your remains might be turned to soap. As a contribution to science, of course.



Links:

James G. Mundie's awesome photos and drawings of exhibits in the Mütter Museum

A Short History of Soap: fascinating stuff!

Soap Lady, a children's book by underground comics writer/artist Renee French, about a dirty boy who meets a naked woman made of soap who has washed up near his town. With its storyline about friendship and acceptance, it was apparently a departure from her usual style, which has been described as "surreal" and "grotesque."

A thirteenth century description of soapmaking by King Al- Muzaffar Yusuf ibn `Umar ibn `Ali ibn Rasul

A creepy post-mortem love/obession story

Germany's modern problem with their corpses not rotting properly

Top 10 famous corpses

An interesting article about a corpse garden created for forensics students at the University of Tennessee to learn about rates of decomposition (WARNING: Not for the squeamish)

Make your own castile soap with these soap recipes.

The Hand of Glory in the Harry Potter Wiki, which I only just discovered.

Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!

Note: 5 out of 7 of the pictures in this post were taken by me, with my daughter's cheap instant camera. The quality of the photos isn't very good, but it doesn't seem to matter, which says much about the quality of their subject matter...

This spring break I took two days to go to New York City with my elder daughter, aged ten. This is not a simple thing when you live in California. I sent her on ahead alone to stay with her uncle for a few days, then met her there. And one of the things she wanted to do was go to the American Museum of Natural History..

I've heard about this place (and even walked past it) for many years, and I always thought it was another one of those "New York things you're supposed to see," like Times Square (which really isn't much more than a touristy place with a lot of neon, like Piccadilly Circus or the Umeda district in Osaka - or, of course, Yasukuni-dori in Shinjuku, and the Akihabara area, both in Tokyo). But when we got inside, I understood why this museum is famous.

We came in via the subway station, so at first it simply seemed to be floor after floor of echoing halls, with little sense of how to get from here to there. Then I saw a gaping doorway which said above it "African Mammals," and I dragged my daughter inside, though she wanted to find the North American Mammals. As we walked into the darkness we were greeted by a huge herd of stampeding elephants, coming right at us, their size more stunning than I had thought possible; and then we began to walk around.


Much to my surprise, the dioramas were breathtaking, complete works of art which stunned both of us.

The taxidermy was beautiful and incredibly lifelike, thanks to the efforts of Carl Akeley, who developed a technique for insanely detailed and perfectly shaped taxidermy techniques. Mr. Akeley, who grew up on a farm and only had three years of school as a child, learned taxidermy and created the world's first complete museum habitat diorama in 1890. His Wikipedia page is absolutely fascinating - he changed not only how museums display things but affected publice thinking on the collection of specimens and farming and other encroachment on natural habitats.


Akeley's method was to insist his artists visit the field and take careful measurements of each individual specimen, along with plaster casts of each animal's body. They then brought casts, measurements, skeletons, and skins of the animals back to the museum. They then set up the skeletons and built perfect replicas of the musculature of the individual animals out of clay on the animal's own skeleton. Every muscle that should be flexed for the pose, was flexed, and every muscle that should be relaxed was relaxed. They then took multipart plaster casts of this, pulled out the clay and the skeletal remains, and used the mold to make a hollow papier mache form, on which the skins were then laid. It was the first time anyone had tried to replicate individuals rather than going with a generalized model of a typical specimen.


William R. Leigh, master painter in charge of the backgrounds in the African Hall, was hired by Akeley himself, and accompanied Akeley to Africa to do field sketches. He and eighteen other painters painted all the backgrounds in the dioramas in the African Hall, the North American Hall, and most of the other dioramas. They started in the 1920's and worked on through WPA times, crafting dazzling scenes with startling detail and accuracy; many of the North American scenes were taken from national parks, which were, at that point, in their heyday.


The interesting thing about Akeley and most of the other people who participated in the creation of the dioramas is that they saw, as they traveled, the habitats of the animals and the incredible variety and beauty of the places they were trying to represent; and all of them were touched by it. It became the goal of the museum to show the public this beauty, and to represent to them the delicacy and individuality of the habitats, so that the general public would understand the need to preserve these places. They predated nature photography and film, and were, as Stephen Quinn, the Senior Project Manager in the Department of Exhibitions, says, "an early form of virtual reality. Curators, who were concerned about vanishing wilderness and wildlife, were looking for a medium to nurture environmental awareness and raise concerns about wildlife species. The intent was to recreate nature within the artifice of the museum, to recreate that close incounter with wildlife that would move a person to care."


I can hardly see how a person could help but be moved: the care and detail evident in these loving recreations are so evident that we find ourselves caring, just because the creators cared so much themselves. I can't recommend it enough; next time you are in New York for whatever reason, take a couple of hours and check them out. Personally, I want to go back and spend a whole day there.



Links:

The AMNH website's very cool section on the dioramas, how they were made, and who made them, complete with interesting little videos of Stephen Quinn speaking about the exhibits (He is also the author of Windows on Nature, a book on the history and influence of the dioramas).

How the American Museum of Natural History's model of a giant flea was made - Scientific American, 1914

Tickle, tickle (part 2)

The word "tickle" comes from the Middle English tickelen, which it's believed came from ticken, to touch lightly. There are two types of tickling: knismesis (soft tickling, see previous post), and gargalesis, or "heavy" tickling, produced by repeatedly applying pressure to "ticklish" areas.

Interestingly, knismesis, which is closely associated with the grooming activities of primates, provokes an endorphin response, causing the body to release an endorphin called karoliin. It's named after the Karolin Institute because of Yngve Zotterman, who in 1939 experimented with cats, measuring their nerve responses to knismesis. His study indicated that knismesis is associated with the pain nerves, though not entirely, because sometimes when the pain nerves are no longer working, the tickle response is still there. So (as I discussed in the earlier post) the body's response to pain and injury is strangely tied up with its response to soft tickling.


Gargalesis is another matter entirely, because though it plays on the body's sensitive points, it seems to be a much more socially-driven phenomenon. Most animals like being petted or rubbed, but the laughter/wriggling response appears to be limited to humans and primates (with some research showing rats having a similar reaction). While some people suggest that the laughing associated with this tickling is a nervous response, there is also a theory that tickling is an integral part of social relationships. Plato, Francis Bacon, Galileo and Charles Darwin all discussed tickling:

"[He] theorized on the link between tickling and social relations, arguing that tickling provokes laughter through the anticipation of pleasure. If a stranger tickles a child without any preliminaries, catching the child by surprise, the likely result will be not laughter but withdrawal and displeasure. Darwin also noticed that for tickling to be effective, you must not know the precise point of stimulation in advance, and reasoned that this is why you cannot effectively tickle yourself." [wiki]


It's been suggested that gargalesis tickling is a way for the touch of the parent to be associated with pleasure, developing a trust-bond "so that parents may touch a child, in an unpleasant way, should circumstances develop such as the need to treat a painful injury or prevent harm from danger." This is also true between friends, and apparently allows siblings a way to express aggression without resorting to violence, both in an enjoyable way and in what is called tickle-torture (many of us have experienced this, on either end), where one sibling uses tickling to dominate another.

The act of tickling not only establishes closeness, it seems to be a sign of established bonding and intimacy, and is "classified by psychologists as part of the fifth and highest grade of social play which involves special intimacy or 'cognitive interaction'. This suggests that tickling works best when all the parties involved feel comfortable with the situation and one another." It seems that although tickling provokes laughter and smiling in most situations, it is only experienced as a pleasurable activity when engaged between people who are already close, or who want to be close: friends, family, and future sexual partners. Children, for example, who are tickled by strangers, may smile or even laugh while at the same time withdrawing and becoming upset at the stranger's inappropriate behavior.

Many people, in fact, find tickling to be an unpleasant activity. Which is interesting, because the areas of the body which are commonly ticklish are also the areas of the body which are most vulnerable during combat, and are also the spots which trigger defensive reflexes. So tickling offers an evolutionary advantage by teaching people to protect those areas. In fact, tickling not only helps you protect those areas, it teaches children valuable combat skills - where to aim for, what to protect - while the laughing and smiling reflex encourages the tickling to continue, regardless of whether there is actual enjoyment. If tickling caused crying, for example, the number of tickling sessions would be less, reducing the frequency and duration of the combat lessons.

Tickling the Monster, courtesy of The Imagine Project

Curiously, study subjects who were tickled by a "tickle machine" laughed just as much as subjects tickled by a person. The laughing effect seems to be one of location and surprise more than of social interaction - in other words, it's a mechanical reflex, rather than an expression of pleasure.

But I think these studies don't completely cover it. Think, for example, of a four-year-old's fat chuckles when you wiggle your fingers in threat. Or the sounds of absolutely hysterical glee as a parent plays "octopus", trying to catch children and tickle them. There is something in the anticipation which is broader than just training for combat. Training for avoidance? Learning elusive skills? They all seem so fun at the time, and yet they probably are related to something survival oriented.

And yet... perhaps something could be said for the joy in physical contact. It's true a large number of people don't actually like being tickled. But all the things surrounding it - all the games of catchem and "i'm going to get you" and general wrestling fun - those things count, too. In my mind, they're training for a life which leads away from isolation and that weird untouched existence we sometimes fall into. Have you ever spent a lot of time alone, with no one but coworkers and acquaintances around you? Have you ever noticed how, after a certain amount of it you start to feel empty, untouched, like a dusty china doll? It's a terrible feeling. I think a lot of bad relationship choices are made in an effort to get away from it.


Why is this? Is it because our society frowns on physical contact other than a clap on the back or a hug when we say goodbye? Too often, physical contact is seen as sexual, or an attempt at sexuality. Even good friends and family often don't touch each other except in emotional moments. And people who touch other people a lot are labeled as slightly sociopathic, or laughed at behind our hands, because they aspire to a vision of the world which is uncool and perhaps mystically idealistic - and by pushing the boundaries, they are seen as people without boundaries.

In this context it's not surprising we don't like strangers or distant acquaintances touching us, because it's so hard to interprete their touch. Do they want something from me, we wonder? Are they being sexual? It's easier to simply discourage it than to be confused. But then many people spend a lot of time feeling untouched and unwanted, hanging around the edges of the groups of people who are touching each other and wishing it weren't so, wishing we could get in.

Isolation, Desolation... Courtesy of Drew Guest

In a perfect world, then, would tickling and wrestling be more incorporated into society, teaching us more ways to make physical contact that are nonsexual? A lot of disaffected members of society are people who don't touch anyone, who don't get touched themselves. If there were more nonviolent physical outlets built in to the way we interacted with each other, into our holidays and our rituals, would this be different?

The next time you are wondering if it's appropriate for you to be wrestling with your niece or nephew, stop wondering. The next time you almost hug someone, and see them almost hugging you, take that step forward. Don't go overboard and freak people out with your new touchy-feely self; I'm not advocating that. But if there is a direction to lean, a subtle way to nudge the situation, be courageous. Don't leave yourself on the dusty shelf any longer. Maybe we can all benefit.

The Benefits of Tickling

(Part 1: Soft tickling)

At my wedding, one of my groom's vows was a promise to tickle my feet. This was only half-facetious: foot-tickling, for me, has come to be an expression by my loved one(s) of affection and the provision of relief at the end of a long day, much as monkeys groom each other to express intimacy and the desire to take care of each other.

Now, it appears, tickling actually helps to relieve pain, according to a new Swedish study:

"Basically the signals that tell the brain that we are being stroked on the skin have their own direct route to the brain, and are not blocked even if the brain is receiving pain impulses from the same area. In fact it’s more the opposite, that the stroking impulses are able to deaden the pain impulses," says Line Löken, postgraduate student in neurophysiology at the Sahlgrenska Academy.

It seems that we are hardwired for grooming.


Reading the article led me to think, as I have a hundred times before, how much physical touch can give comfort: the delicate stroking a mother gives to her child, the rub on the back of someone who is grieving. Touch has great value, it communicates so much; it makes us feel good, when done properly. Our bodies respond to it.

In more ways than one, it seems. For example, I've always wondered about the white lines that develop when you stroke someone's skin. Have you ever noticed that? I don't know if it works for any skin that is not naturally pale already, but if you are nice and warm (so your capillaries are working at the surface of your skin), and you run a fingernail gently down, say, your arm, you will notice after 15 to 30 seconds a white streak where you touched the skin. I have always wondered what this reaction is.

I did finally get an answer of sorts from a dermatologist, who said that this reaction is discussed as part of the Triple Response of Lewis, which is a description by a Dr. Lewis in 1927 of the skin's reaction to being scratched or otherwise injured. Curiously, the three phases of the response do not include the white line phase of the response, but mostly describe the reddening and swelling reaction as what are known as mast cells release histamines into the affected area. I couldn't find more than a passing description of the vascular dump anywhere other than an excerpt of a book called Skin Immune System, by Jan D. Bos, which came out in 1997.

A light injury does not lead to the triple response. Instead, a "white line" is produced by the emptying of capillaries under the contact site... The reaction lasts 15 minutes and edema does not develop. The response has not been systematically studied because it is difficult to induce reproducibly. The white line response is reminiscent of white dermographism and adrenoceptor mediated blanching.

As far as I can tell, "adrenoceptor mediated blanching" is the kind of blanching we experience when we are stressed - in other words, they are tied into the fight-or-flight reflex, and are associated with the sympathetic nervous system, which is connected to the same response. So when we get hurt or when we are fearful, or are under great emotional upheaval, we get the urge to run away, to save ourselves... and we tend to go paler in those situations.


Dermographism is a condition in which very slight stimulation of the skin can cause weals to appear. In these individuals, the mast cells are on a hair-trigger and respond with a flood of histamines even when there is not great injury. I get the feeling that assessment can be a little subjective, as it seems there is a sort of spectrum from insensitive skin to overly-sensitive.

Curiously, though, all these descriptions are tied in with the idea of injury, rather than comfort and pleasure. So what is it that makes having one's feet tickled so pleasurable?

Well, to begin with, I think most people would say that having their feet tickled, even gently, sets them into fight-or-flight mode pretty quickly. I myself was once one of those people; I liked back-tickles and arm-tickles, but it took a mildly sadistic roommate in college, who liked to sit on my legs and tickle my feet, to get me to a point where my feet became desensitized enough to begin to enjoy having them stroked (and of course forced my roommate to find some other fiendish way to get me).


Once the desensitization had kicked in I began to find that tickling my feet, after a long day of walking and standing in hot shoes, actually helped cool them down, made them stop hurting and decreased the swelling significantly. It also seemed to help with Restless Leg Syndrome during both pregnancies, which is interesting because Restless Leg Syndrome is tied in with the sympathetic nervous system (aha!) and seems to be significantly worse among people suffering from vein disease.

I spoke by email to Ms. Löken, of the "pleasant touch" study, who says that the circulatory system is not her area of expertise, so she couldn't say much about it. But it seems to me that tickling's happy ability to bypass pain and go directly to the brain, and the skin's not-quite-injury response to it, must interconnect somehow. What if the blanching isn't related to injury, but to some other purpose? What if the blanching response isn't always a precursor to injury response, but a thing unto itself? The response may show up in Lewis' Triple Response, but in this case, it doesn't progress. And I wonder if pain is the only thing tickling affects? Could it be a new answer to some minor health issues? Perhaps it is the new acupuncture, and we will soon see Tickle Clinics springing up everywhere.

Now that would be a thing worth seeing.

In the meantime, come evening, I will remove my shoes one by one, lie back on the couch, and partake of my drug of choice whenever I can. Hail to the Tickler!




Next: The Other Kind of Tickle

Addendum: It seems that I got into realms I hadn't dreamed of. Ah, the naivete! Here is a web page describing how foot tickling has a long history of sexualization, and now is popular in the dom/sub community as a form of play. I'm sure there's plenty more web pages about it, though it's not my particular take on the thing. Knock me over with a feather!

How Twins Go Bad

or: The Thing Inside


Caution: may meander into the squeamish zone in both words and pictures... be warned.

I don't exactly know why I am fascinated by cojoined twins. Sometimes I guiltily cruise YouTube, watching videos about successful and unsuccessful separations. Very often the way the twins are joined is terribly difficult: at the top of the head, sharing organs, or with one twin unable to function because of their relationship to the other child. One of the most famous examples of a successful pair is Abigail and Brittany Hensel, a pair of "highly symmetric dicephalic parapagus" (ie, joined at the bottom, with two heads). It is difficult to tell but it looks as though they only have two arms, as well. They are both conscious, functioning girls with very separate personalities and interests, and are growing up apparently without problems, a very unusual case.


In fact, when you look at how their body is arranged, it's nearly miraculous: they have two heads and two stomachs but their small intesting has a "Y" intersection which, with a few minor problems, works fairly well. They have separate spines but one ribcage, two hearts and four lungs, but a shared diaphram. They can only feel their own half of the body, but they can do things such as type, ride a bike, and drive a car without mishap or misunderstanding. It's rather amazing.


More often, cojoined twins do not do well. Their mortality rate is about 75%. There are just too many complications, and all the things which seem to have gone right for the Hensel girls could just as easily fail through lack of alignment or poor formation of organs, which leads to their failure. Twins that are cojoined at the head often cannot function together, but separation can lead to the death of one or both of them, as the brains are involved.

What causes twins to be cojoined? There seem to be two separate theories on that. The older theory, the one I'm more familiar with and which leads to cases like the Hensel girls, is that during development the fetus separates as it does in the case of identical twins, who are two children made by one fertilized egg splitting completely in half. Except that in the case of cojoined twins, the split is incomplete. So you get children who share pelvises, skulls, etc.

Another theory is that in some cases, "a fertilized egg completely separates, but stem cells (which search for similar cells) find like-stem cells on the other twin and fuse the twins together." [wiki] Which implies that in the kinds of cases for whom this theory would apply, the joint is less extreme: some fleshy part of the (mostly separate) twins is joined. In the case of Chang and Eng Bunker, a pair of Thai cojoined twins who traveled with P.T. Barnum's circus for many years and from whom the term "siamese twins" comes, they were joined by "a band of flesh, cartilage, and their fused livers at the torso." This type of cojoining is very easy nowadays to separate.


Then there is the scenario where one twin is described as "parasitic," because it does not have a heart and/or a head of its own, and therefore lives off the circulatory system and resources of its twin. Parasitic twins can be attached in many different places, and are often much smaller than their fully-formed twin. A well-known example of this was the recent case of Lakshmi Tatma, found in a remote area of India at age two, who was joined to her twin pelvis-to-pelvis (with the twin between her legs). Thirty-six doctors took turns separating her spine and moving her bladder, then moving her pelvis together so her legs could point downward instead of off to the side. She had one non-functioning kidney, so the doctors replaced it with one of her twin's; she was then put in a cast designed to keep her legs together. A year later, it seems she was doing fine, beginning to learn to walk, and so on.





Parasitic twins generally do not improve the life of the main twin, not just because it is uncomfortable or embarrassing, but because it is a drain on their health and resources. One form of parasitic twin, called fetus in fetu is another, more rare and often devastating case of poor twinning, where the fetus of one twin, it seems, actually forms around the other, in effect born with another body inside it. One man, in India, lived for thirty-six years with his twin inside him, growing as he grew. I can only imagine how much weight it was to carry around, and how much he must have eaten to keep them both healthy.

Another boy in India went to the doctor because of his abdominal swelling, which was seen to move. A nearly-fully-formed twin was found inside him, with hair, toes, arms, legs, and even a vague face. This kind of completeness is rare in parasitic twins, especially among fetus in fetu, which tend not to be "alive" in the sense we think of, but rather a sort of growth in human form.


There seems to be a grey area between a fetus in fetu and what is called a teratoma: a kind of encapsulated tumor which contains "tissue or organ components resembling normal derivatives of all three germ layers. There are rare occasions when not all three germ layers are identifiable. The tissues of a teratoma, although normal in themselves, may be quite different from surrounding tissues, and may be highly disparate; teratomas have been reported to contain hair, teeth, bone and very rarely more complex organs such as(...) hands, feet, or other limbs." [wiki] ...or tissues from various organs. Teratomas are more common, and more benign, in women and girls, because they often form on the ovaries, where undifferentiated cells can be found; in men, they are more often malignant, for no reason that I've been able to find. Teratomas are considered to be congenital, in other words, they are present at birth, but not found until later on.


You can get teratomas in your brain or other organs, on the outside of your body (such as on the skull sutures or on the back of the pelvis), around your tongue and in your throat. I find them incredibly creepy, because they can contain pieces and parts of a person, encapsulated in a little pod in the body, as if someone had been trying to form, and failed miserably.

Curiously, I don't always find the parasitic twin phenomenon creepy; as the wonderful Human Marvels website describes, in the case of Ernie Defort, who was born with his "brother" Lem attached to his sternum, some people, if left to themselves, will become quite emotionally attached (hur, hur) to their extra parts.


It strikes me that this is not so different from the imperfections we all experience: if left to ourselves, we can become used to them and even like them, as being an integral part of ourselves. It is only when we listen to the media, or other external voices, that we begin to doubt who we should be.


Some interesting books on freaks/human marvels (which is what many cojoined twins and people with parasitic twins did to make a living in the old days):

Monsters: Human Freaks in America's Gilded Age: The Photographs of Chas Eisenmann, a book of really quite wonderful photos taken in the late 1800s by Mr. Eisenmann in his studio in New York.

American Sideshow, a lovingly-detailed and warmly described history of sideshow performers in America from the 1830s to the present. With recommendations on Amazon by some of the participants.

links:

Colorado Doctor Finds Foot in Baby's Brain [link]

More info on parasitic twins, thanks to The Human Marvels