First and last lines for Nothing to Envy

First:

If you look at satellite photographs of the Far East by night, you'll see a large splotch curiously lacking light. This area of darkness is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

Last:

It is a North Korean phenomenon that many have observed. For lack of chairs or benches, the people sit for hours on their haunches, along the sides of roads, in parks, in the market. They stare straight ahead as though they are waiting-for a tram, maybe, or a passing car? A friend of relative? Maybe they are waiting for nothing in particular, just waiting for something to change.

Even more about synesthesia

I heard the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran on The Leonard Lopate Show talking about his new book, The Tell-Tale Brain. Which sounds like a must read. The subject of synesthesia came up, as did mirror neurons and phantom limbs and some other stuff.

Color blindness is a condition affecting the retina. They have done research on people who are color blind and have synesthesia and find they can provoke images of colors they have never seen by showing them numbers.

As I had written before, synesthesia originates because of unusual wiring in the fusiform gyrus region of the temporal lobe. The most common form is grapheme-color synesthesia, the kind where numbers and letters get associated with colors. The fusiform gyrus is also associated with determining shapes so this makes sense. A friend of mine has this form of synesthesia, although he says he didn't realize until he got married that this wasn't the way everyone saw numbers.

Although only about 1 in 50 people exhibit this trait, about 1 in 8 artists and novelists have it. It brings up interesting ideas about how art evolved so early in our species (when leisure time wasn't plentiful.)

They also still don't know how exactly a clump of neurons became the human brain and all that that entails. Ramachandran said it's a mystery (the kind that makes scientists giddy.) He also talked about Chomsky's theories of the brain, which I only know in relation to language. That is, Chomsky believes the brain is born innately wired for language (the way pidgin evolves into creole is cited as one proof of this.) I guess I need to read to book to see what he was talking about but he did say that perhaps when a billion neurons are compressed into a small space, unpredictable things-like making a brain-will happen. That's a cool idea.

What I've learned from Nothing to Envy thus far

First of all, Barbara Demick can write her ass off. Which is good because otherwise this book would be too bleak to finish (the one chapter about the famine-Wandering Swallows-oh my God I wish I hadn't read page 164.) It's interesting to compare between her and Sonia Shah, who wrote the book I just finished, The Fever, about malaria. Both well researched and interesting topics. Demick is clearly the better writer though and elevates the material literary fiction levels. It's interesting to complement non-fiction by saying it reads like fiction but I've noticed I'm not the only one who makes that comparison. That's why Capote invented the genre of literary non-fiction after all.

The book was written in 2010 but mainly deals with the famine of the 90's. All of the main characters, who all defected to South Korea, are from Chongjin. Demick picked it first to focus on one part of the country in detail. And also because Pyongyang is a city reserved for party faithful and showcase North Koreans (one character says her neighbors were kicked out of the capital because their son has dwarfism.) Pyongyang is also likely to be the only city in the DPRK that Westerners have seen, and few at that-excepting some border towns where South Koreans are allowed in more peaceful times to flow in and out of a bit easier. Hyundai plays an interesting role in that, btw.

Journalists are highly respected because they are the party mouthpieces. This also puts them in the unique position of actually seeing some of the unexpurgated news from the outside, which they can't of course report. But they have to filter it to report only the bad stories from the rest of the world. Doctors are respected but, at the time of the novel at least, not that well paid and expected to gather their own medicinal herbs in the springtime. As in, they take a month or more off to harvest herbs from the countryside. As the economic crisis turned into an energy crisis and the lights went off in the whole country, the factories weren't able to produce drugs and these herbs became more important.


When Kim Il-Song died in July, 1994, the famine was already starting. People stood in mourning lines sometimes two or three times in a row to get the rice cakes they were handing out. There are videos on YouTube of the hysteria. Some of it was genuine and some of it was just due to the psychological nature of hysteria being contagious. But it was also apparent that the inminban (the neighborhood Party spies) were watching to make sure people were mourning sufficiently. The people Demick interviewed described how it became a contest to see who could look the most grief-stricken. One defector who was a kindergarten teacher said she thought one of her students was approaching hysteria and then realized she was spitting on her hands and wiping her face because her mother had told her she was a bad person if she didn't cry.





North Korea is fucked up, yo. When is someone going to pull a Romanov style assassination on that family?

They also reconfigured the calendars a few years after Kim-Il Song's death. Now they use some jive shit called the Juche Calendar. Year 1 is the year 1912 when Kim-Il Song was born. The Gregorian calendar is still used for dates prior to 1912. No wonder South Korea is not ecstatic about the notion of re-unification. How many orders of magnitude worse would this be than the German re-unification?

However, South Korea does have a policy that all North Koreans are South Korean citizens so if you defect, you are a South Korean de facto. However, China doesn't want refugees flooding over their border (and apparently they have been known to catch them and send them back to certain death if found) so you can't defect to China and then request asylum at a South Korean embassy. The Chinese border is of course easier to cross than the DMZ.

Speaking of Juche (the seriously misguided North Korean notion of superiority and self-reliance), some scientist there invented a fabric called Vinalon which is also called the Juche fiber. Like everything in the DPRK, it is shabby and suicidally depressing. It's some cheap shiny fabric that doesn't hold color well so most of the time you will see it in black or gray. If you live above the 38th parallel, you probably have a wardrobe-full of this stiff, uncomfortable, dreary cloth. How comfortable could pants or sheets made from anthracite coal and limestone be?

(apparently in Europe you can buy pet towels made from it.)

During the famine, it was reported that Kim Jong-Il was eating meals of simple potatoes. This isn't true. He has notoriously gourmet tastes and was eating imported lobster and shit. Meanwhile, his subjects were literally combing thru animal shit trying to find some undigested plant material. Nice.

What was good about the famine is that it presented people who were able to survive it with unprecedented freedom to move about a country where normally travel permits are required to go anywhere. This in a country where you had to have a permit to travel and had to inform the local inminban where they were staying. You needed a permit to stay in a motel (and woe betide the single woman travelling alone.) It kind of reminded me of my favorite book that I read for my contemporary Arab literature class, The Story of Zahra by Hanan Al-Shaykh. The Lebanese Civil War brought similar freedom to Zahra, a young unattractive woman from a repressive family in Beirut. There can be moments of exhilarating liberty in the utter collapse of society.

Finally, as long as I'm speaking of shit--North Korea was short of fertilizer in the 90's (maybe they still are) so it was every family's job to collect "night soil" and bring it to a collection center for credits. Night soil is human shit someone had to collect from the toilet that they used to fertilize the crops. How does everyone not have cholera? Anyways, yeah. Gross. I liked how Mrs. Song's daughter got around it though. She would go to the collection center and steal a bucket (because, as the author reasoned, who would guard a warehouse full of buckets of poo?) and then present it for the food credit.

Philomathia: Spartans!

I was listening to a podcast about the story of the Battle of Marathon which got me thinking about Sparta (and Gerard Butler in the days before he starred in wanker romantic "comedies" about vibrating panties. So read the title of this post in a testosterone-laden Scottish accent.)

But first, the Battle of Marathon took place in 490 BC between the Greeks, specifically the Athenians, and Persians of course. John Stuart Mill said it was a more important battle to British history than the Battle of Hastings (the Brits do love their classical Greek history and Latin grammar.) The runner story (his name was Pheidippides) is probably apocryphal but at least he got his name on an Atlanta running store for it.

But what I didn't know is that the whole Battle took place because the Athenians had gone to Darius I in 507 and asked him to become their ally against Sparta. Darius accepted but apparently considered himself the ruler over Athens instead which was kind of a drag so by 499 the Athenians in Asia Minor has burned Darius' capital there, Sardis. It just took the Persians a few years to get around to attacking Greece because of problems in Egypt and by that time leadership had passed from Darius I to Xerxes. Kind of fitting I suppose that the Spartans ended up not helping in the Marathon battle.

(and yes, I reference 300 in the title of this post which is actually the Battle of Thermopylae which was 10 years and force mulipliers later.)

Also, Marathon means "fennel" in Greek. It was a field of fennel so at least the battle smelled good. And fennel "seeds" are apparently actually fruit. And, someone who loves Spartan culture can be called a laconophile.

Actually, the point of all this is I was wondering what became of Sparta? Apparently, it still exists but it is called Sparti. Unlike Athens, it seems to have faded into relative obscurity. Only about 14,000 live in the town itself. They have a museum if there is a laconophile (or Frank Miller fan) in your life. It boasts this claim to fame:

The Museum of Ancient Sparta is the only museum built in Greece between 1874 and 1876 by architect G. Katsaros.

Well, that's....specific. 


And one more note on the philomathia versus epistemophilia. What's the difference? I hadn't really seen the word philomath before so, there's that. Until that is, I read the Dark Horse anthology of Archie comics firsts (I just wish Katy Keene, Sabrina and Josie weren't in separate volumes.) Archie at one point is being hazed by a group called the Philomathians, which is also one of the first appearances of Reggie. Cmon, I can point to being inspired by an Archie comic? No contest. 

First and last lines for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Better late than obsessing about not blogging them until the end of days never.

First:

They're out there.

Last:

I been away a long time.

More I learned from The Fever

Where were we?

Perhaps the discovery that mosquitos spread malaria. For years it was presumed that swamp gas and miasmas caused malaria (hence, of course, its name.) In 1880, a French surgeon stationed in Algeria named Alphonse Laveran first saw Plasmodium in action on a blood slide, seemingly by a random accident of timing. He prepared an infected blood slide and wandered off for 15 or so minutes. In this time the blood had cooled, tricking the parasite into thinking it had returned to an Anopheles's body. The males had sprouted flagella and were looking for wimmen and were squiggling about.

Around the same time, a Scottish physician named Patrick Manson stationed in China had figured out that a type of disgusting worm parasite called filariasis was transmitted by mosquitoes, although he was fairly wrong about a number of things (he thought mosquitoes only bit once in their lives and that the disease was caused by drinking water containing the bodies of contaminated mosquitoes.)  He teamed up with a doctor in the Indian Medical Service named Ronald Ross who apparently was a tool and kind of an idiot. At least, the author thinks so:

Ronald Ross was like many other docs in the British Raj's Indian Medical Service. He professed no particular interest in public health or medicine, or even India, and wasn't especially accomplished.

And his personal correspondence seems to bear out the author's opinions. With disdain for both victims of malaria and naturalists who would know about their vector candidate, he set about trying to prove Manson's theories in India but mainly succeeded in making all the locals distrust and avoid him, for good reason. It was really two Italians who discovered the correct link.

The builder of the Suez Canal, Ferdinand De Lesseps, had tried to build a canal in Panama too (note: where is the date? The author only says they abandoned the effort in 1889. Sloppy, sloppy.) He wanted to protect his workers from the scourges of yellow fever and malaria and invested money in building hospitals with watered gardens and hospital beds with legs that sat in buckets of water to prevent spiders and ants from getting into the patients' linens. Instead, he of course created an even more perfect mosquito habitat and the project was abandoned and his company went bankrupt. Poor dude. He lost his wife and child due to malaria while building the Suez Canal.

Finally of course the Panama Canal was built to the Americans with the help of an Army surgeon named Gorgas. The author does not think as highly of him as Wikipedia does, particularly with his (well, the whole US Government's) racist treatment of non-white canal laborers. BTW, the Panama Canal is how malaria was introduced to Barbados as the infected workers brought it home.

What I've learned so far from The Fever

I've already written about Plasmodium's origins as a protozoan. It started in Africa (of course) and went through several mutations. It evolved from Plasmodium to P. malariae. It wasn't very efficient because it took so long to do its development inside of the Anopheles (on the plus side, it could lie dormant inside a human body for decades as well just waiting for the right mosquito to bite.)

P. malariae  is still around by the way and is referred to as the "benign malaria" or "quartan malaria." Shah refers to quartan fever through the book but never explains what it means. That means the fevers occur at 3-day intervals as opposed to tertian fever, which is the 2-day interval caused by other forms of Plasmodium.

It eventually mutated into a more successful form, P. vivax, that is also still around today. That version could make the round trip from sporozoite to gametocyte in the victim's body within 3 days so it would be ready to spread as soon as 3 days after the victim was bitten. P. vivax was foiled for a while by a human genetic mutation now known as Duffy cells-they are the absence of proteins on the red blood cell's surface which means the parasite can't grab hold. Don't get too excited though because this mutation isn't universally available-Caucasians and Asians generally don't have it. This mutation makes no functional difference to the humans who have it, unlike a later mutation. Which brings me to...

The parasite mutated again into P. falciparum (pronounced fal-SIP-ar-um) which could bypass the Duffy cell mutation and was much more successful at its hemoglobin munching and immune cell evasion. The sickle cell mutation is in response to this form of Plasmodium.

Quinine was known as an antidote for centuries and was guarded as a secret by the Spanish (and that now explains why they were more successful than that ill-fated Scottish colony at Darien in Panama.) It comes from the bark of the cinchona tree which is indigenous to the Andes. Kind of curious that the cure for an African protozoan would be found in South America. How old is this thing? Does it date back to when these continents were attached?

(Holy shit. I just found the most amazing site with a map of the Pangea breakup. If somehow the tree and the parasite are related, that would mean it's as old as the Jurassic period at least, so ~ 130 million years.)

So, quinine. It did start to catch on but various attempts to transplant it and cultivate it elsewhere were met with Spanish resistance and difficulties in cultivation. The Dutch finally got a quinine-rich variety growing in their colony on Java after much trial and error. The problem was they cornered the market and were charging ridiculous prices. The US tried to sue them for antitrust violations in the 1930's but the Dutch Kina Bureau didn't give a shit. What finally broke their monopoly was WWII. The Germans seizes the Netherlands while the Japanese seized Java. This led to the invention of chloroquine (and the less successful quinacrine which apparently turns your skin yellow and can cause psychosis. It is still being used in some cases so try not to catch Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease or eat poo, like my roommate did in Syria.)

Some famous people who died of malaria include Alexander the Great (probably),  Genghis Khan (ditto), Lord Byron and 4 popes within 100 years in the Middle Ages. Oliver Cromwell died of it in 1652 although the quinine remedy was known-due to the remedy being advocated by Jesuits, he thought it was some kind of Catholic plot and died which is some beautiful karma at work. Oddly enough, his successor Charles II died of malaria too in 1685 (wikipedia says kidney failure but Shah's book is footnoted.) Charles actually did take the cinchona bark remedy but it wasn't until 1820 that two French chemists (Pelletier and Caventou) isolated the compound and figured out how to extract it. Depending on the age or species of cinchona bark you select to munch upon, you might get a mouth full of splinters and no quinine.

There was a statue in France commemorating Pelletier and Caventou's achievement but the asshole Nazis melted it down to make munitions during the War.