“An outbreak of zombies is likely to be disastrous, unless extremely aggressive tactics are employed against the undead,” the authors wrote. “It is imperative that zombies are dealt with quickly, or else we are all in a great deal of trouble.”
From Wired, ‘Mathematical Model for Surviving a Zombie Attack‘ by Betsy Mason
Staff of the Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Centre let the chimps watch the burial of Dorothy, an elderly chimpanzee, so they could come to terms with her loss.
From Times Online.
A daguerreotype made public last week is believed to be the only known image of Phineas Gage (1823-1860).
Gage was a 25-year-old foreman, fit and well-regarded. His crew were digging a railroad bed near Cavendish, Vt. Late on the afternoon of Sept. 13, 1848, he wielded a specially made iron – it measured 3 feet 7 inches long and weighed 13 pounds – to pack blasting powder into rock.
An explosion erupted. “And we think the tamping iron went all the way through the skull – like a missile,’’ said Dr. Ion-Florin Talos, a researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
A close examination of the object clutched by the man in the picture shows an inscription matching the engraving on the tamping iron, which reads in part, “This is the bar that was shot through the head of Mr. Phineas P. Gage.’’
He has had enduring fame as the index case of an individual who suffered major personality changes after brain trauma. As such, he is a legend in the annals of neurology, which is largely based on the study of brain-damaged patients.
“It’s kind of a wonder,’’ Dr. Talos said, “and wonders are always fascinating.’’
From the Boston Globe.
Another fascinating account of the case appears at Neurophilosophy.
When we use the adjective ‘classical’, we mean to suggest certain qualities possessed by the classical Greek and Roman worlds: restraint, symmetry, clarity and seriousness of purpose, harmoniousness of proportion, a lack of excessive ornament. Whatever image we conjure up to accompany the idea, whether it’s a building or a piece of sculpture, one thing is certain: it will be white.
I had read before that those ancient buildings and statues were originally not white at all, but brightly coloured. It’s hard to keep that it in mind while contemplating the corridors of marble white sculpture in the Vatican Museum, though. The whiteness of them seems to accord with very deep cultural prejudices and is hard to shake.
The New Scientist reports that a team at the British Museum has found the first evidence of coloured paints used on the Parthenon, built in the 5th century BC. Researcher Giovanni Verri has developed an imaging technique sensitive to Egyptian Blue, a pigment known to have been used in ancient times. Shining red light onto marble, the pigment absorbs the red spectrum and emits infrared light. Through an infrared camera, any area that was once blue will glow.
Traces of the pigment have been found on statuary and on the building itself.
Ian Jenkins, a senior curator at the British Museum, says the temple would have looked “jewelled” and “busy”. Judging by similar Greek sculptures, the pigments used were probably blue and red beside contrasting white stone, and liberal use of gold leaf.
Seeing evidence of this kind of painting for myself at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples was an aesthetic shock. The realism of ancient art was something I just wasn’t prepared for, keeping in mind that the statues were so often painted as well as sculpted with astonishing fidelity to life.
The annoyingly conscientious guards stopped me from taking pictures, but this one, of Scipio Africanus the Elder, is floating about the internet. It has painting on the eyes still intact, but is plain otherwise. My memory is that others still had bits of flaking paint attached to them.
The figures I saw came from the Villa of the Papyri, the house of a wealthy and cultured lover of philosophy and the arts who lived at Herculaneum, the less famous neighbouring town of Pompeii. Unfortunately the town and the villa met the same fate as their sister city in 79 AD.
Still, had they not been subsumed in rock and ash on that terrible day, these breathtaking sculptures would not now be in a museum upsetting the smug preconceptions of twenty first century folk like me.
A very interesting recent piece I found almost at random on the nature of Dostoyevsky’s epilepsy.
I had known that he was believed to be epileptic, but I didn’t know that the condition was self-diagnosed. Relatively little was understood about the condition in the 19th Century, causing Freud to disbelieve the diagnosis on the grounds that it was found only among the mentally feeble. He thought the condition was a straight case of hysteria. Yes, but then he always believed that…
On the basis of recent comments, it seems the consensus is that it was in fact temporal-lobe epilepsy. He described his seizures in such great detail both in his correspondence and in the mouths of his characters, that modern researchers have a remarkably complete account of his condition.
His auras were ecstatic in nature. The sensation was so powerful, that:
“For several moments,” he said, “I would experience such joy as would be inconceivable in ordinary life – such joy that no one else could have any notion of. I would feel the most complete harmony in myself and in the whole world and this feeling was so strong and sweet that for a few seconds of such bliss I would give ten or more years of my life, even my whole life perhaps.”
The author (I can’t find a name attached to this piece), conjectures a connection between the nature of Dostoyevsky’s ecstatic states and his religiosity, his pervasive sense of guilt, his feeling of dread.
Because of his epilepsy, Dostoyevsky was, to borrow the title of his second novel, a “double man”; a rational, exalted being on the one hand, and, because of his illness, a mystical and base creature on the other. It seems that as his life progressed, and his epilepsy became more severe, the latter persona prevailed, as evidenced by the increasingly mystical nature of the work produced later in his life.
“One day you could find yourself sitting in a bar next to a humanoid robot, who is taking a shot of vodka to give himself the energy to go to work”, says Ray Baughman, a nanotechnologist at the University of Texas at Dallas, in the 25 March edition of New Scientist.
He’s talking about self-powered artificial muscles he has developed that could be used in robotic and prosthetic limbs, in a report by Zeeya Merali. A mixture of oxygen and methanol or hydrogen is passed over the platinum coating of a nickel-titanium wire, which catalyses a reaction between the gases. This releases heat, which warms the wire and makes it contract. When the fuel stops and it cools, it returns to its previous shape. The wire muscle exerts 100 times the force of a natural muscle of the same size, according to Baughman.
The problem is how to deliver the fuel to the muscle. Someone should send Ray Baughman a DVD of Matt Groening’s series ‘Futurama’, featuring the appropriately named robot Bender who requires the chemical energy from alcohol to be able to function properly. Excessive drinking is necessary or he will become sober and unable to control his body.
If they manage to build one of these robots, I just hope they program it to say “Bite my shiny metal ass!”
Sign Language 