Philomathia: brain stuff

So, my Dictionary.com word of the day the other day was philomath: a lover of learning. It came with a great quote from Aldous Huxley, "It is precisely for the philomaths that universities ought to cater." And, yeah.

I was listening to a story on Science Friday a few weeks ago about a woman who didn't experience fear due to lesions on her amygdala. I guess Nature reported on the story years ago saying she couldn't recognize the facial expression of fear but that's only the tip of the iceberg. 

The Changing World did a series on the mysteries of the brain in December which I'm just now getting around to listening to. They discussed among other things how the brain combines sensory information together without being picky about where it comes from, which is why when you watch a movie in a theatre you think the words are emanating from the screen. And how our sensory input can mislead us according to one researcher who is working on the connection between taste and our other senses. He tricked a group of oenophiles (in fact the more people knew about wine, the more easier they were fooled) by taking a white wine and coloring it red. The wine experts started smelling chocolate and tobacco notes that they didn't smell when the wine was white. And how closely related hearing and taste are, which is kind of freaky. Our experience of how stale a potato chip is as much about mouth feel as about the crunch sound.

What was most interesting though is their discussion of synesthesia, which kind of fascinates me anyways. They spoke to a BBC presenter that had it. A doctor who is studying it believes this condition emanates from a part of the temporal lobe called the fusiform gyrus. I knew Kandinsky (the founder of the Blue Rider) was believed to have synesthesia but apparently Nabokov had it as well. This would be especially useful for a writer as metaphor and synesthesia appear to be closely related. This all makes me think of one of my favorite studies, the bouba/kiki effect. It's no coincidence that there are certain phonological similarities in world languages, such as the word for mother frequently starting with or containing the "m" sound. And the words for small things often containing the "ee" sound (like "tiny" or "little" in English versus "kaleel" in Arabic, for example.)

I switched over to the Trebuchet font because it's more pleasing and round and friendly to my eyes. However, if I were to make my choice based on logic rather than aethetics, I should choose an less visually pleasing font according to recent research that ugly fonts increase the reader's data retention. So, this would have been a better choice.

First thoughts on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

I despair that I will not finish this before book club next week. However, I am enjoying it after having some trouble getting started. The voice of Bromden takes some getting used to. I think I reach the boundaries of my intellect (or of my Asperger's) when I try to interpret an author's meaning and choices. It's kind of thrilling in a solipsistic way to find a well-defined boundary to such a thing. Anyways, I can see the Ken Kesey is making a specific and conscious artistic choice to narrate the story through the eyes of a paranoid schizophrenic (?) although one review I read said it did a disservice to Chief Bromden to frame him in psychiatric trappings. What I can't figure is why he made this choice.

It's also impossible to read this without thinking about the movie. At any rate, I'm enjoying the very visual prose. The care Kesey takes to describe the calluses on McMurphy's palms or Bromden's visit to a cotton gin when he was a teenager. Kesey spends a lot of time actually describing hands I notice. It makes me think about the non-fiction writer Richard Preston. In his preface to Panic in Level 4, he says he always asks the person he is writing about if he can see their hands. For a doctor at USAMRID, he was able to visualize and empathize with her story about cutting her hands in the morning in her kitchen, going to work on a Level 4 autopsy, and cutting her glove with a dirty scalpel. She ran through decontamination fearing she had broken the skin and infected herself with an unspecified hemorrhagic fever. It turned out the blood in her internal glove was where her cut had reopened.

Preston said hands were a way he learned about the subject. Not that that's what Kesey is doing, it's just how I'm perceiving it.

I loved this line from McMurphy which is fine advice for life:

"You ever been kneed in the nuts in a brawl, buddy? Stops you cold, don't it? There's nothing worse. It makes you sick, it saps every bit of strength you got. If you're up against a guy who wants to win by making you weaker instead of making himself stronger, than watch for his knee, he's gonna go for your vitals."

Ice storms-even less fun that the depressing Rick Moody novel

(that was a great book and movie. Although the movie felt at times like watching an imaginary documentary about my parents. Sigourney Weaver even looks and acts just like my Mother. That part where she quoted Margaret Mead was a very weird moment for me. Anyways...)

So, we had an ice storm last week. I got what was probably a concussion when I slipped and fell on the ice. I gather that because my vision was blurry for a few hours and I was kind of confused. On the bright side, it was kind of peaceful.

Anyways, I can write about concussions and whiplash all day (who couldn't, really) but what I wanted to discuss was ice storms. I was curious about what causes this shit-tastic phenomenon. Apparently, the cause is a layer of warm air trapped between two layers of cold air which causes snow to melt and then rapidly re-freeze on its way down. This other website says you also need near 100% humidity.

The thickest ice storm on record was in Idaho in 1961, where they recorded 8 inches. I knew there was a reason I didn't want to live in Idaho (although the Mormons are reason enough.) I can't find exact numbers but all of the local sites say we should have gotten 1/2 to 1".

This site is written for kids but has some good info nevertheless.

It could have been worse. The Northeast got it bad. And Chicago, as usual. And I didn't lose power like a lot of people here. Wintertime sucks dick, to paraphrase Louisa May Alcott.

Sad news for BBC World Service

I listened to the latest episode of The World in Words and the BBC World Service is being cut. 5 languages are being eliminated and it looks like the Balkans are being hit particularly hard: Macedonian, Serbian and Albanian along with Portuguese for Africa and English for the Caribbean. Several more including Mandarin Chinese, Hindi and Russian will be internet only. The one that makes the most sense is they are greatly reducing their presence on shortwave, except for in Africa which shows the most use. The World Service is not only the single impartial news source for parts of the world (well, there's still Voice of America but they've been hit by cuts too and aren't as good, although it was naturally a BBC spokesperson who said this. But I think they are right), but they represent an important source of soft power for Britain.

Finally, some are concerned about what world government could move in to fill the vacuum left in the BBC's wake. The names floated were Iran, Russia, and China who, now that you mention it not surprisingly, have been moving to expand their broadcasts in other languages. They have a Swahili station that is widely listened to in Kenya. The problems with all of these of course is all of them are state mouthpieces. Iran would easily be the most egregious of the three.

There's some grim belt tightening going on in Britain currently. The Guardian Science Weekly podcast has been concerned about the freeze on science funding in the UK and the future of the Royal Society's book prize for science writing. The shortlist for last year can be found here. My favorite based purely on titles is We Need to Talk About Kelvin.

On a completely different topic (but it does concern beloved old England and science), I found a copy of Ken Russell's trippy should-have-been camp classic The Lair of the White Worm for a few bucks and bought it. I always preferred Ken Russell to Nicholas Roeg, the other director that springs to mind when discussing weird British filmmakers of the 70's and 80's. Wikipedia tells me among other things that Ken is 87 years old now and that Crimes of Passion was considered an all-around failure which is news to me. I think that movie is awesomely hilarious ("What are you going to do? Fuck somebody to death?" "Only the right girl." RIP, Tony Perkins.)

Anyways, White Worm. Roman snake gods, a classic performance by Amanda Donahoe, a young Hugh Grant, that chick from Dynasty being nearly violated by a wooden ceremonial dildo (that looked a lot like Tony Perkins' pointy tipped death vibrator in Crimes of Passion come to think of it), blasphemy. Good times. However, I blanched at the scene where the archeologist uncovers the skull of the white worm at a Roman dig site. His girlfriend asked, "Oh, the Romans didn't have pet dinosaurs?" "No," he says, "they were 25 million years apart." 25??? Try 65 million, minimum. Oh, Ken. I know the British school system is superior to ours. Yes, it's a stupid thing to get hung up on but it is still bugging me. At least he didn't say 6000 years ago. That seems to be almost entirely American idiocy thus far.

Finally, timelines. They are important. I always struggle with some of the early man dates. I got a book from the library called Science ASAP by Alan Axelrod that I think I'll have to end up owning. His section on the Bronze and Iron Ages is riveting. By 5000 BC, people were wearing copper ore ornaments. It took them 1000 years to figure out how to smelt copper ore. But some copper was harder than others and some was too soft to do anything practical with. We now know of course this was due to the impurities in the different samples. It took them another 1000 years, ~3000 BC, to figure out that smelting copper and tin together yielded the much tougher alloy bronze and the Bronze Age began.

They knew that there was a still tougher material, iron, but the only easily obtainable source of it was in meteorites (these were the only rocks where iron was not mixed with non-metallic substances and they were somewhat rare.) The problem was wood fires weren't sufficiently hot to free  iron from ore until ~1500 BC when the Hittites invented charcoal by burning wood in a low oxygen environment. Result: no flame but a much hotter fire. And voila.

This process never yielded a product as good as that found in those rare ferrous meteorites though. The smelting process was perfected over a few hundred years to cause the carbon from the fire to combine with the iron until carbonized steel was born ~1000 BC at the advent of the Iron Age. There was a great episode of Nova about the making of Samurai swords which explains some of this.

It's kind of amazing this all happened over millennia. It's more amazing because like many scientific discoveries, it likely resulted from someone paying attention during a happy accident.

Epistemophilia: Founding neologists

I was listening to an episode of PRI's To the Best of Our Knowledge on the subject of linguistics. They interviewed Patricia O'Connor (the word lady that is always on WNYC.) She said several of the founding fathers were big neologists. Washington gave us hatchet man (although he meant it literally), bakery, indoors, off-duty, paroled and nondiscrimination. Jefferson gave us pedicure and monotonously and he loved creating new words so much he coined the term neologism. Or rather, Washington and Jefferson were at least the first recorded users of those words. Lincoln first used the word relocate and coined the phrase "point well taken." Nice to know they were carrying on in the tradition of Milton and Shakespeare.

She also said what Americans think of as the British accent is a fairly recent development. She theorizes it came about after the Revolutionary War, including that posh Oxbridge accent that Americans all feel salivate over.  The Brits also love to criticize us for stinking up the language but American English actually preserves some elements that British English didn't, like the subjunctive mood (example: "I suggest he get a job" versus "I suggest he gets a job.")

They also had a man named Dan Everett on who started out as a missionary in the Amazon Jungle and ended up studying their language. The tribe, called the Piraha, speaks a tonal language which is notoriously difficult for Westerners to get a handle on. He suggested whistling the words to hear the tonal vowel differences which is an excellent idea actually. What I liked best about him though is he decided he would rather study their language and culture rather than stick them in Church singing "Jesus Loves Me" and looking for Satan under their beds. Well done.

First and last lines What's Eating Gilbert Grape

First:

Standing with my brother Arnie on the edge of town has become a yearly ritual.

Last:

The sirens fill the air, the walls in Momma's room fall down in flames, and Amy says, "Yes, Arnie, look at the lights."

Final thoughts on What's Eating Gilbert Grape

I love the movie, it's one of my favorites. The book...I liked and parts were really funny but it's not the same as the movie and maybe I did want the two to be more similar. The Mamma character isn't near as likable and when you are so fat that you are virtually immobile and not particularly useful, you had better be a charming motherfucker, not some stinky lump who bangs on the table demanding their whole box of cereal and package of Kools be brought to them for breakfast. There are extra siblings-Larry and Janice-who flew the coop and send money home but visit rarely. There are also a few plot threads that were dropped from the movie: a local boy who became a huge celebrity for being a Des Moines newscaster whom Gilbert naturally hates, Gilbert's school being burned down after being closed for several years, and Gilbert's grade school teacher who humiliated him on the same day his dad hung himself dying. Arnie is still Arnie, although he has the addition of a glass eye caused by a dartboard accident that will make my eye sockets ache to recount. The Becky character is different-and 15. Gilbert is 24. Uhm, ick. Also, the events surrounding Mr. Carver's demise were condensed and made much more sense in the movie. Mr. Carver asks Gilbert to come over and show his kids that a trampoline is fun? Don't really get it.

(I did like Mrs. Carver leaving him the trampoline. You can see it being used in the movie at Arnie's party but they never explain how it got there.)

Gilbert is more like Holden Caulfield than the movie character. Maybe that is why I don't quite click with this book as I'm one of maybe ten people (pearl clutchers excepted) who didn't love Catcher in the Rye. Gilbert is a miserable stoical character who speaks little which is just as well since most of what he would say is insulting. He does like his boss Mr. Lamson and his sister Amy. More than anything, he deplores emotion and hasn't cried since his father hung himself. He meets Becky and has a nightmare that this girl will make him cry. And she does eventually. I get it understand why people would love this book, I just didn't myself.

Here are a few snippets of Gilbert's musings:

I'm staring at her trying to decide the most discrete way to murder.

If Amy's so worried about the floor, why did she back Momma an entire meat loaf?

I dream about pretty people and fast cars, and I dream I'm still me but my family is someone else. I dream I'm still me.

Momma says a person shows their gratitude by action, not by words. So I guess that means she thanks me by smoking every cigarette in every pack.

Momma stops, her big tongue pushes out of her mouth like on the National Geographic specials when a whale rises out of the water for air.

All I know is that Arnie's big eighteenth birthday is going to be something else. And if Momma hasn't fallen through the floor and if Arnie hasn't died in his sleep and if Ellen isn't pregnant and if the other Grapes haven't gone further off the edge, maybe, maybe we'll be okay.

I should thank Lance for giving Arnie the next-president award. But I make a point to not say thanks.

I find Mr. Carver in his wife's station wagon, rolling down his window in a panic, shouting, "Gilbert! Gilbert! Gilbert!" The moment has finally come. Mrs. Carver has told him everything and he has come to remove my genitalia with a hacksaw.

(on newly widowed Mrs. Carver)

Her fingers are afraid. This is more interesting than whether she's a murderess. To me, the man deserved death but perhaps a more violent, gruesome end would have been more appropriate.

"Everything is great," I say. "Everything is peachy. I've got a mother who would eat her arm is she had enough barbecue sauce, a dorkass older brother and a wicked sister who got out of this town, a little bitch of a sister who very likely made love to Jesus last night, an ever-fattening older sister who deserves a decent man, and a retard brother who, we have reason to believe, has gone into hiding and is once again terrified of water."