POETRY

1. “a tumbling” (Bacon, 2025)

I am a tumbling of flesh and thought
a flowing yearning of blood and snot
a changeling, a god, a war ever fought
a twitching, a falling, until this soul rot
what is this flux that nature hath wrought

2. “Men at Forty” (Donald Justice, 1966)

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it moving
Beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father’s tie there in secret,

And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

3. “The Two-headed Calf” (Laura Gilpin, 1977)

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass.
And as he stares into the sky, there
are twice as many stars as usual.

4. Chinatown, NYC

5. BankingSlut

BORGES (TIMECATS)

Time is the substance I am made of.
Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river;
it is a tiger that destroys me, but I am the tiger;
it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.

At the railroad station he noted that he still had thirty minutes. He quickly recalled that in a cafe on the Calle Brazil (a few dozen feet from Yrigoyen’s house) there was an enormous cat which allowed itself to be caressed as if it were a disdainful deity. He entered the cafe. There was the cat, asleep. He ordered a cup of coffee, slowly stirred the sugar, sipped it (this pleasure had been denied him in the clinic), and thought, as he smoothed the cat’s black coat, that this contact was an illusion and that the two beings, man and cat, were as good as separated by a glass, for man lives in time, in succession, while the magical animal lives in the present, in the eternity of the instant.

HISTORY

6. The strange and sad history of the Cagots

The Cagots were a persecuted minority who lived in the west of France and northern Spain: the Navarrese Pyrenees, Basque provinces, Béarn, Aragón, Gascony and Brittany. Evidence of the group exists as far back as AD 1000.

The origins of the Cagots remain uncertain, with various hypotheses proposed throughout history. Some theories suggest they were descendants of biblical or legendary figures cursed of God, or the descendants of medieval lepers, while others propose they were related to the Cathars or even a fallen guild of carpenters. Some suggest descent from a variety of other marginalized racial or religious groups. Despite the varied and often mythical explanations for their origins, the only consistent aspect of the Cagots was their societal exclusion and the lack of any distinct physical or cultural traits differentiating them from the general population.

The Cagots no longer form a separate social class and were largely assimilated into the general population. Very little of Cagot culture still exists, as most descendants of Cagots have preferred not to be known as such.

While Cagots followed the same religion as the non-Cagots who lived around them, they were subject to variety of discriminatory practices in religious rites and buildings, this included being forced to use a side entrance to churches, often an intentionally low one to force Cagots to bow and remind them of their subservient status. They were either altogether forbidden to partake of the sacrament, or the Eucharist was given to them on the end of a wooden spoon. They had their own holy water fonts set aside for Cagots, and touching the normal font was strictly forbidden. These restrictions were taken seriously; with one story collected by Elizabeth Gaskell explaining the origin of the skeleton of a hand nailed to the church door in Quimperlé, Brittany, where in the 18th century, a wealthy Cagot had his hand cut off and nailed to the church door for daring to touch the font reserved for “clean” citizens.

The marginalization of the Cagots began at baptism where chimes were not rung in celebration as was the case for non-Cagots and that the baptisms were held at nightfall. They were at times compelled to wear a distinctive dress to which, in some places, was attached the foot of a goose or duck (whence they were sometimes called Canards), and latterly to have a red representation of a goose’s foot in fabric sewn onto their clothes. They were typically not allowed to enter taverns or use public fountains.

Few consistent reasons were given as to why Cagots were hated; accusations varied from them being cretins, lepers, heretics, cannibals, sorcerers, werewolves, sexual deviants, to actions they were accused of such as poisoning wells, or for simply being intrinsically evil. They were viewed as untouchables, with Christian Delacampagne noting how it was believed that they could cause children to fall ill by touching them or even just looking at them, being considered so pestilential that it was a crime for them to walk common roads barefooted or to drink from the same cup as non-Cagots. It was also a common belief that the Cagots gave off a foul smell. Joaquim de Santa Rosa de Viterbo recorded that many believed Cagots were born with a tail. Many Bretons believed that Cagots bled from their navel on Good Friday.

The French early psychiatrist Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol wrote in his 1838 works that the Cagots were a subset of “idiot”, and separate from “cretins”. By the middle of the 19th century, previous pseudo-medical beliefs and beliefs of them being intellectually inferior had waned and German doctors, by 1849, regarded them as “not without the ability to become useful members of society.”

7. Find someone who glazes you like Pliny the Younger glazed the stoic philosopher Euphrates (c. 35-118 AD).

Euphrates is possessed of so many shining talents, that he cannot fail to strike and engage even the somewhat illiterate. He reasons with much force, penetration, and elegance, and frequently embodies all the sublime and luxuriant eloquence of Plato. His style is rich and various, and at the same time so wonderfully sweet, that it seduces the attention of the most unwilling hearer. His outward appearance is agreeable to all the rest: he has a tall figure, a comely aspect, long hair, and a large white beard: circumstances which though they may probably be thought trifling and accidental, contribute however to gain him much reverence. There is no uncouthness in his manner, which is grave, but not austere; and his approach commands respect without creating awe. Distinguished as he is by the sanctity of his life, he is no less so by his polite and affable address. He points his eloquence against the vices, not the persons of mankind, and without chastising reclaims the wanderer. His exhortations so captivate your attention, that you hang as it were upon his lips; and even after the heart is convinced, the ear still wishes to listen to the harmonious reasoner.

MADNESS

8. RELEASE THE THIRD SECRET POPE LEO XI, YOU COWARD

Aer Lingus Flight 164 was a scheduled Boeing 737 passenger flight that was hijacked on 2 May 1981, en route from Dublin in Ireland to London Heathrow in England.

While on approach to Heathrow, about five minutes before the flight was due to land in England, a 55-year-old Australian man named Laurence James Downey went into the aircraft lavatory and doused himself in petrol, a highly flammable liquid. He then went to the cockpit and demanded that the plane continue on to Le Touquet – Côte d’Opale Airport in France and refuel there for a flight to Tehran, Iran. Upon landing at Le Touquet, Downey further demanded the publication in the Irish press of a nine-page statement which he had the captain throw from the cockpit window

After an eight-hour standoff (during which time Downey released 11 of his 108 hostages), French special forces stormed the plane and apprehended Downey. No shots were fired during the ordeal and nobody was injured. It was later found out that Downey was being sought by police in Perth, Australia, in connection with a $70,000 land fraud incident, and was also wanted in Shannon, Ireland, for alleged assault. He was sentenced in February 1983, in Saint-Omer, France, to five years' imprisonment for air piracy

In his statement, Downey claimed to have been a Trappist monk in residence at Tre Fontane Abbey in the 1950s (this was later confirmed by monastery officials), before he was expelled from the order for punching a superior in the face. He then took a job as a tour guide in central Portugal, at a shrine devoted to Our Lady of Fátima, the reported origin of the Three Secrets of Fátima. At the time of the hijacking, the third secret was known only to the Pope and other senior figures in the Catholic Church; Downey's statement called on the Vatican to release this secret to the public.

The Third secret of Fátima was released in 2000…or at least that’s what they want you to think…

Critics such as Italian journalist and media personality Antonio Socci claim that the four-page handwritten text of the Third Secret released by the Vatican in 2000 is not the real secret, or at least not the full secret

9. The Resurrection (La Resurrezione)

…is a bronze and brass sculpture by Pericle Fazzini in the Paul VI Audience Hall in Rome. Intended to capture the anguish of 20th century mankind living under the threat of nuclear war, La Resurrezione depicts Jesus rising from a nuclear crater in the Garden of Gethsemane. Fazzini summarized the action of the statue as "Christ rises from this crater torn open by a nuclear bomb; an atrocious explosion, a vortex of violence and energy.” The sculpture’s dimensions are 66 ft × 23 ft × 10 ft (20.1 m × 7.0 m × 3.0 m). It weighs 30 tons and cost $400,000.

10. The Penza Recluses

The Penza Recluses were an Independent Russian doomsday cult founded by Pyotr Kuznetsov which borrowed some ideas from Eastern Orthodoxy. The self-given name of the group was “Heavenly Jerusalem”. The group broke away from the Russian Orthodox Church, considering it “insufficiently” orthodox. Its members were not allowed to eat processed food, watch television nor handle money. They rejected bar codes, social security and other national identification numbers, and passports as they are said to feature satanic imagery and other symbols, such as the “Eye of Providence” and “the number of the Beast”.

In November 2007, between 29 and 35 members of the group holed themselves up in a cave in Russia's Penza region, near the village of Nikolskoye, threatening mass suicide by explosion if authorities or community members tried to intervene. Kuznetsov had told them to hide themselves away, to pray and await the end of the world, which he predicted would take place in May 2008. Kuznetsov, himself, was not with the group, as he had been placed under police arrest. Nonetheless, policemen, religious leaders, and various media outlets all camped outside of the cave for nearly six months, in the depths of winter, anxiously waiting to see if any members of the group would eventually give up and leave.

On March 28, 2008, seven women who had been in the cave were treated by emergency workers, regional officials said. Three days later, another 14 members emerged from the cave, after melting snow caused part of the cave’s interior to collapse.

On April 3, 2008, Kuznetsov was taken to a hospital where “Officials said that he may have attempted suicide after realising his prediction had been wrong.” In subsequent years, he was in a psychiatric ward, with a diagnosis of paranoia. In 2016, the court again extended the duration of his treatment, per the request of the chief of the regional psychiatric clinic.

On May 16, 2008, the last nine members of the cult emerged from the cave due to toxic fumes produced by decaying corpses; two fellow cult members had died during their stay in the cave. On May 21, after removing the bodies of the deceased, the cave was blown-up. Officially, this was done out of safety concerns, and its potential hazards to the local population and curious visitors. Several cult members would relocate to a deaf village in Belarus.

After their stay in the cave, most of the sect members left Nikolskoye, except for the family of Vasily Nedogon, with his wife and three children. As of 2012, the Nedogons continued to live without electricity and passports; they still wait and pray to God that the end time’s arrival will be imminent.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

11. In October of last year, I founded a NYC-based secret society.

The Orbis Tertius Society: a shadowy cabal, a benevolent conspiracy, a metaphysical expedition, an experiment in thought, a trivial game.

To whom it may concern: The OT Society is now defunct. It does not exist. Do not reach out to me and ask to join. The OT society does not exist.

12. Some recent essays from Seeds of Science’s Best of Science Blogging feed (curated by yours truly)

• Why Psychology Hasn’t Had a Big New Idea in Decades by Ethan Ludwin-Peery

• How to Make SuperBabies by Gene Smith

• Learning to Be: how learning strengthens the emergent nature of collective intelligence in a minimal agent by Michael Levin

• 134 Orgasms in an Hour? Questioning the Methodology of the Orgasm World Records by Mark Miller

• Epistemic Hell by Roger’s Bacon

• Music in Human Evolution by Kevin Simler

• A Natural History of Beauty by Kevin Simler

• Cold humans and warm machines (on the seductions of AI conversations) by Sander Van de Cruys

• IQ discourse is increasingly unhinged by Erik Hoel

ART

13. Find someone who glazes you like Colin Wilson glazed Van Gogh

In approaching the work of such a man as Van Gogh, an attitude of completely uncritical acceptance (such as most of us feel towards the dogmas of higher mathematics) may be more rewarding than the intellectual-critical approach. What we are most aware of in Van Gogh is that the ‘thought-riddled nature’ has been very decisively kicked-out, and the result achieved is Lawrence's ‘immediacy of sense perception’. The Pro and Contra have disappeared; with the senses awakened, it becomes nonsense to talk about human misery. Certainly there is misery, but it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters that any human being ever thought; only this.

MUSIC

MORE ART

I dreamed that a word rose up from under the ground. It came from below and passed before me: I looked at it and my hair stood on end.

What does man actually know about himself? Is he, indeed, ever able to perceive himself completely, as if laid out in a lighted display case? Does nature not conceal most things from him — even concerning his own body — in order to confine and lock him within a proud, deceptive consciousness, aloof from the coils of the bowels, the rapid flow of the blood stream, and the intricate quivering of the fibers! (Nietzsche)

2. Oink

The demon which spawneth from this most unholy porcine union:

2. Public Service Announcement:

The true metaphysicians are found among the debauchees. It is by extenuating, by martyrizing our senses that we realize our nothingness, the abyss our frolics conceal for a moment. (Emil Cioran)

4. Be the change we need

5. We could be so much more free

6. This haunting “glitch in the matrix” story from an old reddit post:

My last semester at a certain college I was assaulted by a football player for walking where he was trying to drive (note: he was 325 lbs, I was 120 lbs), while unconscious on the ground I lived a different life.

I met a wonderful young lady, she made my heart skip and my face red, I pursued her for months and dispatched a few jerk boyfriends before I finally won her over, after two years we got married and almost immediately she bore me a daughter.

I had a great job and my wife didn't have to work outside of the house, when my daughter was two she [my wife] bore me a son. My son was the joy of my life, I would walk into his room every morning before I left for work and doted on him and my daughter.

One day while sitting on the couch I noticed that the perspective of the lamp was odd, like inverted. It was still in 3D but... just.. wrong. (It was a square lamp base, red with gold trim on 4 legs and a white square shade). I was transfixed, I couldn't look away from it. I stayed up all night staring at it, the next morning I didn't go to work, something was just not right about that lamp.

I stopped eating, I left the couch only to use the bathroom at first, soon I stopped that too as I wasn't eating or drinking. I stared at the fucking lamp for 3 days before my wife got really worried, she had someone come and try to talk to me, by this time my cognizance was breaking up and my wife was freaking out. She took the kids to her mother's house just before I had my epiphany.... the lamp is not real.... the house is not real, my wife, my kids... none of that is real... the last 10 years of my life are not fucking real!

The lamp started to grow wider and deeper, it was still inverted dimensions, it took up my entire perspective and all I could see was red, I heard voices, screams, all kinds of weird noises and I became aware of pain.... a fucking shit ton of pain... the first words I said were "I'm missing teeth" and opened my eyes. I was laying on my back on the sidewalk surrounded by people that I didn't know, lots were freaking out, I was completely confused.

At some point a cop scooped me up, dragged/walked me across the sidewalk and grass and threw me face down in the back of a cop car, I was still confused.

I was taken to the hospital by the cop (seems he didn't want to wait for the ambulance to arrive) and give CT scans and shit..

I went through about 3 years of horrid depression, I was grieving the loss of my wife and children and dealing with the knowledge that they never existed, I was scared that I was going insane as I would cry myself to sleep hoping I would see her in my dreams. I never have, but sometimes I see my son, usually just a glimpse out of my peripheral vision, he is perpetually 5 years old and I can never hear what he says.

7. Writing advice from David Bentley Hart:

All these vapidly doctrinaire injunctions – urging you to write only plain declarative sentences stripped of modifiers and composed solely of words familiar to the average ten-year-old and demanding that you always prefer charcoal-gray to sumptuous purple – are expressions of everything spiritually deadening about late modernity and its banausic values. They reflect an epoch in which the mysterious, the evocative, and the beautifully elliptical have been systematically suppressed and nearly extinguished in the name of the efficient, the practical, the mechanical, and the starkly unambiguous – in short, in the name of everything that makes existence uninviting and life boring. They are reflections of an age of bloodless capitalist economism, the reign of brutally common sense, the barbarian triumph of function over form, a spare, Spartan civic architecture of featureless glass and steel and plastic, a consumerist society that lives on the ceaseless production and disposal of intrinsically graceless conveniences. Learn to detest all of these things and you will be a better writer for having done so.

8. Hokusai (1760-1849):

From the age of six, I had a passion for copying the form of things and since the age of fifty I have published many drawings, yet of all I drew by my seventieth year there is nothing worth taking into account. At seventy-three years I partly understood the structure of animals, birds, insects and fishes, and the life of grasses and plants. And so, at eighty-six I shall progress further; at ninety I shall even further penetrate their secret meaning, and by one hundred I shall perhaps truly have reached the level of the marvellous and divine. When I am one hundred and ten, each dot, each line will possess a life of its own.

9. The pixel art of niftymonki

10. THEY TRADED LUKA FUCKING DONČIĆ TO THE GODDAMN LAKERS

11. The Kentucky Meat Shower:

The Kentucky meat shower was an incident occurring for a period of several minutes between 11 a.m. and 12 p.m. on March 3, 1876, where what appeared to be chunks of red meat fell from the sky in a 100-by-50-yard area near Olympia Springs in Bath County, Kentucky. There exist several explanations (from blood rain to vulture ejecta) as to how this occurred and what the “meat” was.

On March 3, 1876, a farmer’s wife, Mrs. Crouch, was making soap on her porch when she reported seeing a piece of meat fall from the sky. She said she was 40 steps from her house when the meat started to slap the ground. Mrs. Crouch and her husband believed the event was a sign from God.

Most of the pieces of meat were approximately 2 by 2 inches (5 cm × 5 cm); at least one was 4 by 4 inches (10 cm × 10 cm). The meat appeared to be beef, but according to the first report in Scientific American, two men who tasted it judged it to be lamb or deer. Writing in the Sanitarian, Leopold Brandeis identified the substance as Nostoc, a type of cyanobacteria. Brandeis gave the meat sample to the Newark Scientific Association for further analysis, leading to a letter from Dr. Allan McLane Hamilton appearing in the Medical Record and stating the meat had been identified as lung tissue from either a horse or a human infant, “the structure of the organ in these two cases being almost identical.” The composition of this sample was backed up by further analysis, with two samples of the meat being identified as lung tissue, three as muscle, and two as cartilage.

In 2024, the Bath County History Museum opened an exhibit for the Kentucky meat shower, showcasing a preserved piece from the event.

12. ICYMI: “All the affairs of the King’s domain are safe and sound”

A faint buzzing taints the silence, the sound of flies festering a rotting corpse. The birds here are drunken and strange. There is a blurring at the edges if you look closely, a distortion in the geometry. There are trees that are not trees. There are people that are not people. Automatons, phantoms, wraiths. The bank teller winked at me, a savage glint in her dead black eyes.

I dream only of conveyor belts, endless conveyor belts.

13. The achingly beautiful piano music of Hania Rani

Other favorites: Woven Song, Malasana

14. As some of you know, I am the founder and head editor of Seeds of Science. As a part of our ongoing efforts to support independent researchers and promote creativity and diversity of thought in science, we recently launched a subscription revenue sharing program for our Substack (TLDR—we will distribute our yearly proceeds to the authors whom we feature on the Best of Science Blogging feed).

I don’t ask for much—in fact, I don’t ask for anything; Secretorum is a labor of love and of hate; I don’t want my pure and innocent blogging tainted by your filthy money. But if you enjoy whatever the fuck it is I do here and would like to support my work, I do ask that you please consider a subscription to the SoS Substack.

But why science blogging, you ask. I am convinced that the idea or insight which leads to the next Copernican-level revolution will come not from a peer-reviewed article in Nature or Science, but from a stoned speculation or flight of fancy shared in a humble blog post.

Academic science is dead, has been for some time now; the activists and middle managers who pass for “scientists” these days are constitutionally incapable of producing anything beyond piddling incremental advances.

Rather often, I go to a research talk and feel drowned in data. Some speakers seem to think they must unleash a tsunami of data if they are to be taken seriously. The framing is neglected, along with why the data are being collected; what hypotheses are being tested; what ideas are emerging. Researchers seem reluctant to come to biological conclusions or present new ideas. The same occurs in written publications. It is as if speculation about what the data might mean and the discussion of ideas are not quite ‘proper’.

I have a different view: description and data collection are necessary but insufficient. Ideas, even tentative ones, are also needed, along with the recognition that ideas will change as facts and arguments accumulate. Why are researchers holding back on ideas? Perhaps they are worried about proposing an idea that turns out to be wrong, because that might damage their chances of getting promotion or funding.

—“Biology must generate ideas as well as data” (Nurse, 2021, in Nature)

Only those not yet ground down by the academic machine—the students, the amateurs, the alchemists, the mystics—are still capable of revolutionary thought.

I think really good science doesn’t come from hard work. The striking advances come from people on the fringes, being playful. (Kary Mullis)

Recent SoS Best of Science Blogging posts:

• “IQ discourse is increasingly unhinged” by Erik Hoel

• “An Innovation Agenda for Addiction” by CASPR and IFP

• “Maybe it's just YOUR testosterone that’s low” by Eryney Marrogi

• “Genetically edited mosquitoes haven't scaled yet. Why?” by Eryney Marrogi

• “What factors allow societies to survive a crisis?” by Florian Jehn

• “Scientific Charlatans and Where to Find Them” by Konstantin Asimonov

• “The Eve Theory of Consciousness” by Andrew Cutler

• “The invincible human moth” by Erik Hoel

• “Homo sapiens vampiris” by Peter Watts

• “Fictional parasites very different from our own” by Abhishaike Mahajan

Last year’s SPOOKY SEASON EXTRAVAGANZAAAHHH!!!!

PROPHECY

1. The Xhosa prophetess Nongqawuse (1841 – 1898)

In April 1856, 15-year-old Nongqawuse and her friend Nombanda, who was between the ages of 8 and 10, went to scare birds from her uncle's crops in the fields by the sea at the mouth of the River Gxarha in the present day Wild Coast region of South Africa. When she returned, Nongqawuse told Mhlakaza (her uncle and guardian) that she had met the spirits of two of her ancestors. She claimed that the spirits had told her that the Xhosa people should destroy their crops and kill their cattle, the source of their wealth as well as food. Nongqawuse claimed that the ancestors who had appeared to them said:

1. The dead would arise.

2. All living cattle would have to be slaughtered, having been reared by contaminated hands.

3. Cultivation would cease.

4. New grain would have to be dug.

5. New houses would have to be built.

6. New cattle enclosures would have to be erected.

7. New milk sacks would have to be made.

8. Doors would have to be weaved with buka roots.

9. People must abandon witchcraft, incest, and adultery.

In return, the spirits would sweep all European settlers into the sea. The Xhosa people would be able to replenish the granaries and fill the kraals with more beautiful and healthier cattle.

During this time many Xhosa herds were plagued with “lung sickness”, possibly introduced by European cattle. Mhlakaza did not believe her at first but when Nongqawuse described one of the men, Mhlakaza (himself a diviner) recognised the description as that of his dead brother, and became convinced she was telling the truth. Mhlakaza repeated the prophecy to Sarili. The cattle-killing frenzy affected not only the Gcaleka, Sarili’s clan, but the whole of the Xhosa nation. Historians estimate that the Gcaleka killed between 300,000 and 400,000 head of cattle.

Not all Xhosa people believed Nongqawuse’s prophecies. A small minority, known as the amagogotya (stingy ones), refused to slaughter and neglect their crops, and this refusal was used by Nongqawuse to rationalize the failure of the prophecies during a period of fifteen months (April 1856 – June 1857).

Nongqawuse predicted that the ancestors’ promise would be fulfilled on February 18, 1857, when the sun would become red. After the failure of Nongqawuse's prophecy, her followers initially blamed those who had not obeyed her instructions. They later turned against her. Chief Sarili visited the River Gxarha’s outlet, and spoke with Nongqawuse and Mhlakaza. When he returned, he announced that the New World would begin in eight days. On the eighth day the sun would rise, blood-red, and before setting again, there would be a huge thunderstorm, after which “the dead would arise”. During the next eight days the cattle-killing climaxed. These prophecies also failed to come true.

The practices ended by early 1858. By then, approximately 40,000 people had starved to death and more than 400,000 cattle had been slaughtered. The population of British Kaffraria decreased from 105,000 to fewer than 27,000 due to the resulting famine. The chief of Bomvana gave Nongqawuse to Major Gawler and she stayed at his home for a period. One day, Mrs. Gawler decided to dress her, along with the Mpongo prophetess Nonkosi, and have their portrait taken by a photographer. This is the widely circulated image of Nongqawuse that most people are familiar with. After her release, she lived on a farm in the Alexandria district of the eastern Cape. She died in 1898.

2. The precognitive art of Victor Brauner

Victor Brauner was a Romanian painter in Paris during the heyday of Surrealism. Over the early and middle 1930s, he became obsessed with the theme of blinding, and painted several portraits where one eye was blinded or impaled, starting with a 1930 Self-portrait with Enucleated Eye. Eight years after he painted this ghostly and weird self-portrait, Brauner interceded to break up a fight between two fellow painters, Oscar Dominguez and Esteban Francés. Dominguez hurled a glass at Francés but missed, striking Brauner in the left eye instead, leaving him blind in that eye the rest of his life. Needless to say, it was a major, even catastrophic turning point in the life and career of this artist, “impossibly” foreshadowed in his work over the course of nearly a decade.
(“Art and the Precognitive Imagination”, Eric Wargo)

3. “One day you will be a painter”

Augustin Lesage was born in Saint-Pierre-les-Auchel, Pas-de-Calais, into a family of miners and was sent to work in a coal mine from an early age.

In 1911, when he was 35 years old, Lesage claimed he heard a voice speak to him from the darkness of the mine and tell him, “One day you will be a painter”. The only contact Lesage had had with the arts at that point in his life was a visit to the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille museum in Lille during his military service. The experience prompted him to explore communication with what he believed was the spirit world, and within a year of his first experience Lesage was hearing more voices, this time specifically giving him instructions. The voice told him what to paint, what art supplies to buy and where to find them. It was his belief that the voice speaking to him was the spirit of his little sister who had died at the age of three.

On purchasing his first canvas, Lesage mistakenly bought one ten times as large as he had intended. His spirit guides instructed him not to be daunted, but to begin painting. Large canvasses became his chosen format.

Lesage went on to develop a highly symmetrical style, drafting detailed patterns and monolithic constructions reminiscent of Egyptian and Oriental architectural forms.

Lesage claimed that when starting a new work he never had any idea about what he would paint: “I never have an overview of the entire work at any point of the execution. My guides tell me; I surrender to their impulse”

At first Lesage never signed his paintings, and then began to sign them 'Leonardo Da Vinci'. It was only later that he began to add his own signature.

From 1912 Lesage began to produce a regular output of paintings. His service in the First World War interrupted his artistic pursuits, but he was able to resume his work in 1916. By 1923, Lesage was able to support himself exclusively with his artistic efforts.

BALEFUL BABIES

4. To everyone’s surprise

5. Coffin Birth (a.k.a. postmortem fetal extrusion)

Typically during the decomposition of a human body, naturally occurring bacteria in the organs of the abdominal cavity (such as the stomach and intestines) generate gases as by-products of metabolism, which causes the body to swell. In some cases, the confined pressure of the gases can squeeze the uterus (the womb), even forcing it downward, and it may turn inside-out and be forced out of the body through the vaginal opening (a process called prolapse). If a fetus is contained within the uterus, it can therefore be expelled from the mother’s body through the vaginal opening when the uterus turns inside-out, in a process that mimics childbirth.

The mechanism of postmortem fetal extrusion is not completely understood, as the event is neither predictable nor replicable under experimental conditions. Evidence has accumulated opportunistically and direct observation is serendipitous.

ABOMINABLE ANIMALS

6. Victoria Chang:

Jan.29.2022
The ants are back. When I see them, I want to kill them right away, and when I do, I am wide awake from killing. Nothing can take me from my focus. A murder of crows flies over me. Once I followed them to a tree and watched them grieving a dead crow. Thirty of them yelling into the sky.

I let my father die alone.

7. The final breath, the final scream

8. Bat bombs

…were an experimental World War II weapon developed by the United States. The bomb consisted of a bomb-shaped casing with over a thousand compartments, each containing a hibernating Mexican free-tailed bat with a small, timed incendiary bomb attached.

Dropped from a bomber at dawn, the casings would deploy a parachute in mid-flight and open to release the bats, which would then disperse and roost in eaves and attics in a 20–40-mile radius (32–64 km). The incendiaries, which were set on timers, would then ignite and start fires in inaccessible places in the largely wood and paper constructions of the Japanese cities that were the weapon’s intended target.

More tests were scheduled for mid-1944, but the program was canceled by Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King when he heard that it would likely not be combat ready until mid-1945. By that time, it was estimated that $2 million (equivalent to $33.8 million in 2024) had been spent on the project. It is thought that development of the bat bomb was moving too slowly, and was overtaken in the race for a quick end to the war by the atomic bomb project. Adams maintained that the bat bombs would have been effective without the devastating effects of the atomic bomb: “Think of thousands of fires breaking out simultaneously over a circle of forty miles [64 km] in diameter for every bomb dropped. Japan could have been devastated, yet with small loss of (American) lives.”

DISGUSTING ACTS OF SEXUAL DEPRAVITY

9. You can create new dimensions for yourself

If you want to get even more out of self-pleasuring—and therefore more out of Masturbation Magic, sex magic with a partner, or sex with a partner in general—you can use conscious masturbation as a technique for enhancing your sexual flexibility. One method is to experiment with different positions. Most people have one preferred position in which they masturbate; frequently, this is lying down. If you vary your masturbation experiments so that you learn to masturbate and climax sitting up, with one leg up on a chair, standing, or lying face-down as opposed to face-up, you can create new dimensions for yourself. So, when you masturbate, change your method. After you have begun to experiment with new methods, you may wish to explore new fantasies, as this too is likely to increase the range of your sexual response. (The Essence of Tantric Sexuality by Mark Michaels & Patricia Johnson)

10. THE ROOM WHERE

BORGES

11. “The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths"

It is said by men worthy of belief (though Allah’s knowledge is greater) that in the first days there was a king of the isles of Babylonia who called together his architects and his priests and bade them build him a labyrinth so confused and so subtle that the most prudent men would not venture to enter it, and those who did would lose their way. Most unseemly was the edifice that resulted, for it is the prerogative of God, not man, to strike confusion and inspire wonder. In time there came to the court a king of Arabs, and the king of Babylonia (to mock the simplicity of his guest) bade him enter the labyrinth, where the king of Arabs wandered, humiliated and confused, until the coming of the evening, when he implored God’s aid and found the door. His lips offered no complaint, though he said to the king of Babylonia that in his land he had another labyrinth, and Allah willing, he would see that someday the king of Babylonia made its acquaintance. Then he returned to Arabia with his captains and his wardens and he wreaked such havoc upon kingdoms of Babylonia, and with such great blessing by fortune, that he brought low his castles, crushed his people, and took the king of Babylonia himself captive. He tied him atop a swift-footed camel and led him into the desert. Three days they rode, and then he said to him, “O king of time and substance and cipher of the century! In Babylonia didst thou attempt to make me lose my way in a labyrinth of brass with many stairways, doors, and walls; now the Powerful One has seen fit to allow me to show thee mine, which has no stairways to climb, nor walls to impede thy passage.”

Then he untied the bonds of the king of Babylonia and abandoned him in the middle of the desert, where he died of hunger and thirst.

Glory to him who does not die.

MACABRE MISCELLANEA

12. You have to admire the dedication…

Stubbins Ffirth (1784–1820) was an American trainee doctor notable for his unusual investigations into the cause of yellow fever. He theorized that the disease was not contagious, believing that the drop in cases during winter showed that it was more likely a result of the heat and stresses of the summer months. While correct in noting that yellow fever was significantly more prevalent in summer, Ffirth’s explanation proved to be incorrect.

The 1793 yellow fever epidemic, the largest outbreak of the disease in American history, killed as many as 5,000 people in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – roughly 10% of the population. Ffirth joined the University of Pennsylvania in 1801 to study medicine, and in his third year he began researching the disease that had so significantly impacted the area. At the time, the causes of yellow fever were unknown, and Ffirth set out to prove that it was not contagious. He was so sure of his theory that he began to perform experiments on himself.

Ffirth chose to bring himself into direct contact with bodily fluids from people that had become infected with yellow fever. He started by making incisions on his arms and smearing infected vomit into the cuts; he then proceeded to pour it onto his eyeballs. He continued in his attempts to infect himself by frying the vomit and inhaling the fumes, and finally, when he did not become ill, he resorted to drinking the vomit undiluted. Endeavoring to prove that other bodily fluids yielded the same results, Ffirth progressed on from vomit, also smearing his body with blood, saliva, and urine. He still failed to contract the disease and saw this as proof of his hypothesis that yellow fever was non-contagious. However, it later emerged that the samples used by Ffirth for his experiments had come from late-stage patients who were no longer contaminated with the virus.

13. Whatever the fuck is going on here

14. Nietzsche:

Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood, and thou wilt find that blood is spirit.

Another century of readers—and the spirit itself will stink.

The fact that everyone may now learn to read will in time blight nor only writing but also thinking.

Once spirit was God, then it became humanity, and now it is even becoming the mob.

15. Sylvia Plath:

God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of “parties” with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter—they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship—but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.

16. The unsettling Trifacial Trinity

“Trifacial” representations of the Holy Trinity were censored by Pope Urban VIII in 1628. Due to the prohibition, the lateral faces of Jesus were later on covered, simulating hair. The pigments that covered the lateral faces was removed during the 1980's decade, revealing the true iconography of the image.

17. Halloween music recommendation: Apple music’s Diddy Essentials playlist, featuring such hits as Creepin’ (remix), I Need a Girl (Pt. 2), Sex in the Porsche, Mind Your Business (Bosses in Love), Act Bad, Bad Boy For Life, Nasty Girl, and Hate Me Now….(yes, this is actual cover art for the playlist.)

1. Word of the month:

A whole view of life is captured in the Old English word dustsceawung ‘dust-watching’, or ‘contemplation of dust’. In Anglo-Saxon times, people would watch motes of dust float in the sunlight, and think about how the dust used to be other things. A book, a tree, the walls of a city—all will fade like the shouts of children on a summer day, or vanish like the memory of a dream.

Relevant:

2. Norm Macdonald

I remember a psychiatrist once telling me that I gamble in order to escape the reality of life, and I told him that’s why everyone does everything.

3. Marcus Aurelius:

How good it is when you have roast meat or suchlike foods before you, to impress on your mind that this is the dead body of a fish, this is the dead body of a bird or pig; and again, that the Falernian wine is the mere juice of grapes, and your purple edged robe simply the hair of a sheep soaked in shell-fish blood!

And in sexual intercourse that it is no more than the friction of a membrane and a spurt of mucus ejected.

How good these perceptions are at getting to the heart of the real thing and penetrating through it, so you can see it for what it is!

This should be your practice throughout all your life: when things have such a plausible appearance, show them naked, see their shoddiness, strip away their own boastful account of themselves.

Vanity is the greatest seducer of reason: when you are most convinced that your work is important, that is when you are most under its spell.

4. A short film:

5. From “The Minnesota Declaration” (Werner Herzog):

Facts cannot be underestimated as they have normative power. But they do not give us insight into the truth, or the illumination of poetry. Yes, the phone directory of Manhattan contains four million entries, all of them factually verifiable. But do we know why Jonathan Smith, correctly listed, cries into his pillow every night?

6. “How First Contact with Whale Civilization Could Unfold”

Before we put these questions to a sperm whale unit, we’d have to think hard about whether we’d act on the answers. Kristin Andrews told me a heartbreaking story about a chimpanzee named Bruno who was taught sign language at the University of Oklahoma. Bruno was encouraged to build his whole life around the practice of asking humans for things. But after a few years, the scientists’ grant ran out and he was transferred to a different facility. When one of the lab’s scientists visited him there, he was distressed to see that Bruno seemed upset. He kept signing Key and Out. The scientist had taught the chimpanzee to communicate, but even in the face of a clear request, the scientist couldn’t help him. “If these whales start saying Go away; make the ships leave, what will we do?” Andrews said. And how will it reflect on us as a society if we ignore them?

7. GG Allin

Kevin Michael “GG” Allin (born Jesus Christ Allin; 1956 – 1993) was an American punk rock musician who performed and recorded with many groups during his career. His live performances often featured transgressive acts, including self-mutilation, defecating on stage, and assaulting audience members, for which he was arrested and imprisoned on multiple occasions. AllMusic called him “the most spectacular degenerate in rock n’ roll history”.

Allin believed in some form of afterlife. He planned to kill himself onstage on Halloween many times in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but was stopped due to prison sentences around Halloween each year. He explained his views on death in the film Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies, stating: “It’s like I’ve got this wild soul that just wants to get out of this life. It’s too confined in this life. I think that to take yourself out at your peak...if you could die at your peak, your strongest point, then your soul will be that much stronger in the next existence.”

8. A remarkable story from WWII:

The two men were Tibetan peasants. In the early 1930s, they embarked on a religious pilgrimage from the area around Yusho in Eastern Tibet to Lhasa. They were intent on entering a monastery-not an uncommon practice for young men in that culture. But early in their journey, as a result of an intense snowstorm, they became lost and wandered along the Dza (Mekong) river into Southeastern China, where they were captured by bandits. Shortly after their capture, the bandits packed up and marched into Northern China to join the Communists, taking the two young Tibetans with them.

From there, the two men escaped, and, after several years in which they probably skirted the northern lip of the Tibetan plateau, blundered into Central Russia, where they fell into the hands of the Russian authorities at Tashkent. The Germans had just invaded Russia, and the Tibetans were inducted into the Russian army and packed off to the Eastern Front as cannon fodder. Before long they were captured by the Germans—it wasn't clear whether by military misadventure or because they simply wandered away from their encampment and in behind the German lines.

Luckily, the German commandant involved in their capture didn't execute them. Instead, he had them transported to Poland, where they worked for a time in a concentration camp— Captain Surry couldn’t determine which one it was, or its size, only that people were, in the words of the Tibetans, coming there “to the smoky light”. But as winter approached, and under threat of the now-oncoming Russian armies, the concentration camp was dismantled and the two Tibetans were inducted into the German Army and transported to Normandy. There, as we know, once again they fell into the hands of a new authority.

Captain Surry went over the events again and again with the Tibetans, convinced that the riddle of their unlikely survival and their profound, elastic passivity in the face of hardship after hardship was eluding him. The modern world had done its worst to them, and yet had done nothing at all. The Tibetans were neither stupid men nor, on their own terms, were they ignorant.

Finally, it came to him. For ten years, these two men had believed that they were dead. Reluctantly, the Tibetans confirmed his theory and elaborated.

In their terms, their ordeal had been a test of their being, and a means, they hoped, of gaining Nirvana, however confusing and unorthodox those means were. They had survived because from the very first days they had believed that they were dead men caught in an unpredictable Bardo, or netherworld.

To the Tibetans, bodily survival had not been a goal, since they believed that they were already dead. They were traversing the netherworld in order to be reborn. They’d sought shelter, eaten and slept only because their bodies continued to make demands for shelter, food and sleep. These demands puzzled them, as did the duration of their ordeal and its peculiar difficulties.

9. “Why Childhood is Bad for Children” (Hannan, 2018)

This article asks whether being a child is, all things considered, good or bad for children. I defend a predicament view of childhood, which regards childhood as bad overall for children. I argue that four features of childhood make it regrettable: impaired capacity for practical reasoning, lack of an established practical identity, a need to be dominated, and profound and asymmetric vulnerability. I consider recent claims in the literature that childhood is good for children since it allows them to enjoy special goods that aren't available in adulthood, or which are harder to access in adulthood. I raise some difficulties for these claims. Then I argue that whatever version of these views survives my criticism will not establish that childhood is overall good for children. This is because the goods of childhood aren’t significant enough to outweigh the bad features associated with being a child. I conclude by suggesting that the badness of childhood for children means that we are likely to owe more to children than to adults.

10. He definitely clocked it

ART

11. Iñigo Bilbao

12. Ganbrood

BORGES

13. “Death and the Compass” (1942)

He spoke; in his voice Lönnrot detected a fatigued triumph, a hatred the size of the universe, a sadness no smaller than that hatred; I was racked with fever, and the odious double-faced Janus who gazes toward the twilights of dusk and dawn terrorized my dreams and my waking. I learned to abominate my body, I came to feel that two eyes, two hands, two lungs are as monstrous as two faces. An Irishman attempted to convert me to the faith of Jesus; he repeated to me that famous axiom of the goyim: All roads lead to Rome. At night, my delirium nurtured itself on this metaphor: I sensed that the world was a labyrinth, from which it was impossible to flee, for all paths, whether they seemed to lead north or south, actually led to Rome, which was also the quadrilateral jail where my brother was dying and the country house of Triste-le-Roy. During those nights I swore by the god who sees from two faces, and by all the gods of fever and of mirrors, to weave a labyrinth around the man who had imprisoned my brother.

CONSCIOUSNESS

14. “A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications” (Kuhn, 2024)

15. Recently published in Seeds of Science: “A Paradigm for AI Consciousness” (Johnson, 2024)

How can we create a container for knowledge about AI consciousness? This work introduces a new framework based on physicalism, decoherence, and symmetry. Major arguments include (1) atoms are a more sturdy ontology for grounding consciousness than bits, (2) Wolfram’s ‘branchial space’ is where an object’s true shape lives, (3) electromagnetism is a good proxy for branchial shape, (4) brains and computers have significantly different shapes in branchial space, (5) symmetry considerations will strongly inform a future science of consciousness, and (6) computational efficiency considerations may broadly hedge against “s-risk”.

SEEDS OF SCIENCE

16. One more time, an announcement from Seeds of Science:

Science needs a “third space” for science beyond academia and industry.

Seeds of Science is launching a new initiative, the SoS Research Collective, a first-of-its-kind virtual research organization for supporting independent researchers (and academics thinking independently). You can read the announcement post to learn more about the motivation, philosophy, and structure of the Collective, but in brief we would like to offer researchers the following:

1. A title (SoS Research Fellow) and dedicated profile page

2. Payment of $50 per peer-reviewed article publishing in our journal

3. Editing and advising services

4. Promotion of your work on the SoS Substack.

Anyone conducting independent research (including undergraduate or graduate students conducting research activities outside of their primary academic work) who feels that they might benefit from being a SoS research fellow is welcome to apply. To apply, shoot us an email that tells us who you are and what your research is about—CV, website, blog, twitter, etc.—and we will go from there (info@theseedsofscience.org). 

As I’ve said before, “I do not charge for any of this sizzling hot content and I never will. Paywalls cannot and should not contain the Bacon; Bacon is for the people, by the people”.

But the SoS Research Collective is going to cost money, and while I personally don’t need your filthy money, Seeds of Science would greatly appreciate it. So, if you’d like to support my work—the silly essays that I write, these links posts, all of the editing, curating, promotion, and recruitment I do for the the SoS journal and now the Collective—then there are two ways you can donate to the cause:

1. Buy me a Coffee

2. A paid subscription to the Seeds of Science Substack (see below for a list of most recent “Best of Science Blogging” posts).

What does a paid subscription get you?

Here’s the rub though—putting ideas (i.e. seeds of science) behind a paywall is sort of against our whole philosophy. So we aren’t going to do that. So what is a paid subscription getting you then? The sheer bliss that comes with knowing you are one of the good guys, that you stand on the right side of history, that your descendents will smile upon your deeds. What I’m really trying to say is that a subscription is really just a donation.

See (6) for an important announcement from Seeds of Science and a note on how you can support my work.

1. Footage from the Wings of Desire (1987) over the song “Hey, Who Really Cares” (1970) by Linda Perhacs from Bueno Film (sadly, now inactive), courtesy of reader Plod Ibre (blog).

Hauntingly beautiful.

Also love this one—footage from Breathless (1960) by Jean-Luc Godard over “Time Moves Slow” by BADBADNOTGOOD ft. Samuel T. Herring

2. The origin of the phrase “tree hugger” is a lot more hardcore than you’d expect given its current connotations.

The Khejarli massacre occurred in September 1730 in Northern India, when 363 Bishnois were killed while trying to peacefully protect a grove of sacred Khejri trees.

In 1726, Abhai Singh of Marwar gained control of the village of Khejarli and Abhai Singh of Marwar granted the estate of Khejarli to Thakur Surat Singh. In 1730, he dispatched one of his ministers, Giridhar Bhandari, to collect wood to be used in the construction of a new palace. Bhandari and his entourage of soldiers arrived in Jehnad, where they demanded access to the village’s trees. Led by a woman named Amrita Devi Bishnoi, the villagers refused to surrender their trees to the Raj's soldiers. Amrita stated that the Khejri trees were sacred to the Bishnois, and her faith prohibited her from allowing the trees to be cut down.

The situation escalated and the Marwan party offered to leave the village's Khejri trees alone in exchange for a bribe. However, this was seen as a grievous insult to the Bishnoi values, and Amrita announced that she would rather die than to allow the trees to be cut down. She and her family began hugging the Khejris, shielding the trees with their bodies. Angered by the rebuke, the Marwans beheaded Amrita and three of her daughters before beginning to cut down the trees. Amrita’s last words were recorded as being “A chopped head is cheaper than a chopped tree”, and this couplet later became a rallying cry for the Bishnois.

News of the ongoing desecration of Jehnad’s trees quickly spread among Rajasthan’s Bishnoi population. In all, Bishnois from 83 villages began to travel to Jehnad in an attempt to save the trees, and a council was convened to determine what could be done about the situation. The council’s decision was that each Bishnoi volunteer would lay down their life to defend one of the threatened trees. Older people went forward first, with many of them being killed as they hugged the Khejris. Seeing this as an opportunity, Giridhar Bhandari claimed that the Bishnoi were only sending forward people whom they thought were useless to be killed. In response, younger men, women, and children began to hug the trees, resulting in many of them being killed as well. In all, 363 Bishnois were killed while protecting the trees.

Shocked by the passive resistance of the Bishnois, Abhai Singh recalled his men and personally traveled to the village to apologize for his minister's actions. He decreed that the village would never again be compelled to provide wood for the kingdom.

3. Word of the day:

Cacoethes - an irresistible urge to do something inadvisable.

“Kelsey had a cacoethes for pulling pranks at church.”

4. Quote of the month:

“Thought and sex are the only human activities which are not totally ridiculous” (Jacques Vallée)

5. Every problem you don’t think about is worse than you think it is.

“The Improvement Default: People Presume Improvement When Lacking Information” (Hillman et al., 2023)

People erroneously think that things they know little about improve over time. We propose that, due to salient cultural narratives, improvement is a highly accessible expectation that leads people to presume improvement in the absence of diagnostic information. Five studies investigated an improvement default: a general tendency to presume improvement even in self-irrelevant domains. Participants erroneously presumed improvement over esoteric historical time periods associated with decline (Study 1). Participants arranged a stranger’s experiences to produce trends of improvement (Study 2). Participants presumed improvement for a fictional city when given no diagnostic information about it (Study 3). Finally, participants who perceived more past improvement were less supportive of policies that may precipitate further improvement (Study 4). Implications for consequences, such as complacency toward improving inequality, are discussed.

6. An announcement from Seeds of Science:

Science needs a “third space” for science beyond academia and industry.

Seeds of Science is launching a new initiative, the SoS Research Collective, a first-of-its-kind virtual research organization for supporting independent researchers (and academics thinking independently). You can read the announcement post to learn more about the motivation, philosophy, and structure of the Collective, but in brief we would like to offer researchers the following:

1. A title (SoS Research Fellow) and dedicated profile page

2. Payment of $50 per peer-reviewed article publishing in our journal

3. Editing and advising services

4. Promotion of your work on the SoS Substack.

Anyone conducting independent research (including undergraduate or graduate students conducting research activities outside of their primary academic work) who feels that they might benefit from being a SoS research fellow is welcome to apply. To apply, shoot us an email that tells us who you are and what your research is about—CV, website, blog, twitter, etc.—and we will go from there (info@theseedsofscience.org). 

As I’ve said before, “I do not charge for any of this sizzling hot content and I never will. Paywalls cannot and should not contain the Bacon; Bacon is for the people, by the people”.

But the SoS Research Collective is going to cost money, and while I personally don’t need your filthy money, Seeds of Science would greatly appreciate it. So, if you’d like to support my work—the silly essays that I write, these links posts, all of the editing, curating, promotion, and recruitment I do for the the SoS journal and now the Collective—then there are two ways you can donate to the cause:

1. Buy me a Coffee

2. A paid subscription to the Seeds of Science Substack (see below for a list of most recent “Best of Science Blogging” posts).

What does a paid subscription get you?

Seeds of Science was lucky enough to receive a small but generous grant from Scott Alexander’s ACX grants about two years ago. Prior to this funding, we were self-funded by the founding team, and while we were/are technically a business enterprise, there were no plans for bringing in revenue (we joked that we weren’t a non-profit but a "no-profit). Now with this new venture and the author fees that we hope to pay our research fellows, we anticipate the grant money will run out some time this year and we will have to go back to the no-profit model.

So that’s why we are now offering paid subscriptions to this Substack. Here’s the rub though—putting ideas (i.e. seeds of science) behind a paywall is sort of against our whole philosophy. So we aren’t going to do that. So what is a paid subscription getting you then? The sheer bliss that comes with knowing you are one of the good guys, that you stand on the right side of history, that your descendents will smile upon your deeds. What I’m really trying to say is that a subscription is really just a donation.

As far as non-financial ways of supporting us (we know all you students and early-career researchers reading this are just ROLLING in the dough), the first thing you can do is spread the word by sharing this post (and the journal) with your friends, family, colleagues, lovers, haters, etc. The second thing you can do is repeatedly shout SEEDS OF SCIENCE at the top of your lungs from the nearest mountaintop. Beyond that, we'd love to hear from anyone who is interested in what we're doing and would like to get involved or help in some way (we can imagine a few roles that might be of interest to some). 

One more thing: I’m also available for podcast appearances to discuss my work with SoS or my writing or whatever weird shit you freaks want to talk about.

7. Recent posts from the “Best of Science Blogging” feed on the SoS Substack:

• Dopamine: Everything you need to know

• Amateur Hour: a thinking guide for independent researchers (and academics thinking independently)

• Taxonomies of Intelligence: A Comprehensive Guide to the Universe of Minds

• The Business of Extracting Knowledge from Academic Publications

• Underrated Reasons to be Thankful

• All Placebos are not created equal

• Geoengineering Now!

• "Diamondoid bacteria" nanobots: deadly threat or dead-end? A nanotech investigation

• We Rarely Lose Technology

• Crazy Science Idea: Tell People Something Is Possible When You Actually Have No Clue

• Science is a strong-link problem

• The talk: a brief explainer of sexual dimorphism

8. This blue man group:

9. Two of my favorite pseudo-historical conspiracy theories:

The “New Chronology” of Russian mathematician Anatoly Fomenko:

The New Chronology is a pseudohistorical conspiracy theory proposed by Anatoly Fomenko who argues that events of antiquity generally attributed to the ancient civilizations of Rome, Greece and Egypt actually occurred during the Middle Ages, more than a thousand years later.

Central to Fomenko’s new chronology is his claim of the existence of a vast Slav-Turk empire, called the "Russian Horde", which played a dominant role in Eurasian history before the 17th century. The various peoples identified in ancient and medieval history, from the Scythians, Huns, Goths and Bulgars, through the Polans, Dulebes, Drevlians and Pechenegs, to in more recent times, the Cossacks, Ukrainians, and Belarusians, are nothing but elements of the single Russian Horde.

Fomenko claims that the most probable prototype of the historical Jesus was Andronikos I Komnenos (allegedly AD 1152 to 1185), the emperor of Byzantium, known for his failed reforms, his traits and deeds reflected in 'biographies' of many real and imaginary persons.[18] The historical Jesus is a composite figure and reflection of the Old-Testament prophet Elisha (850–800 BC?), Pope Gregory VII (1020?–1085), Saint Basil of Caesarea (330–379), and even Li Yuanhao (also known as Emperor Jingzong or “Son of Heaven”, emperor of Western Xia, who reigned in 1032–1048), Euclides, Bacchus and Dionysius. Fomenko explains the seemingly vast differences in the biographies of these figures as resulting from difference in languages, points of view and time-frame of the authors of said accounts and biographies. He claims that the historical Jesus was born in Cape Fiolent, Crimea, on December 25, 1152 A.D. and was crucified on March 20, 1185 A.D., on Joshua’s Hill, overlooking the Bosphorus.

And the Phantom Time Conspiracy Theory:

The phantom time conspiracy theory is a pseudohistorical conspiracy theory first asserted by Heribert Illig in 1991. It hypothesizes a conspiracy by the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III, Pope Sylvester II, and possibly the Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII, to fabricate the Anno Domini dating system retroactively, in order to place them at the special year of AD 1000, and to rewrite history to legitimize Otto's claim to the Holy Roman Empire. Illig believed that this was achieved through the alteration, misrepresentation and forgery of documentary and physical evidence. According to this scenario, the entire Carolingian period, including the figure of Charlemagne, is a fabrication, with a "phantom time" of 297 years (AD 614–911) added to the Early Middle Ages; Which would place us in the year 1727.

10. This kimono:

11. Quotes from authors on books:

If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read? So that it shall make us happy? Good lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. (Franz Kafka,1904)

My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time. Writing breaks open the vaults of the dead and the skies behind which the prophesying angels hide. The mind makes and makes, spinning its web. (Sylvia Plath, 1957)

12. “Taylor Swift does not exist” by Sam Kriss

Completely insane in the best way possible; a master at work.

It’s true: until early 2015, Taylor Swift made a point of never being photographed wearing anything that exposed her navel…. What follows is entirely speculative. But I think—I think—I know what I was so afraid of here. Where is Taylor Swift’s navel? What does a navel mean? Well, as I suggested in my notes, a navel means separation from the amniotic unity of being; it marks the point where we have been torn away from the apeiron and into our limited, earthly selves. By not showing her navel, Taylor Swift was identifying herself with the infinite. But your navel also marks you out as a created being; it slots you into the grand chain of reproductive existence. And Taylor Swift was absconding from that too: she was positioning herself as something uncreated and eternal. Until, suddenly, she wasn’t.

13. “AI and Aaronson’s Law of Dark Irony”

The major developments in human history are always steeped in dark ironies. Yes, that’s my Law of Dark Irony, the whole thing.

I don’t know why it’s true, but it certainly seems to be. Taking WWII as the archetypal example, let’s enumerate just the more obvious ones:

• After the carnage of WWI, the world’s most sensitive and thoughtful people (many of them) learned the lesson that they should oppose war at any cost. This attitude let Germany rearm and set the stage for WWII.

• Hitler, who was neither tall nor blond, wished to establish the worldwide domination of tall, blond Aryans … and do so via an alliance with the Japanese.

• The Nazis touted the dream of eugenically perfecting the human race, then perpetrated a genocide against a tiny group that had produced Einstein, von Neumann, Wigner, Ulam, and Tarski.

• The Jews were murdered using a chemical—Zyklon B—developed in part by the Jewish chemist Fritz Haber.

• The Allied force that made the greatest sacrifice in lives to defeat Hitler was Stalin’s USSR, another of history’s most murderous and horrifying regimes.

• The man who rallied the free world to defeat Nazism, Winston Churchill, was himself a racist colonialist, whose views would be (and regularly are) denounced as “Nazi” on modern college campuses.

14. “Lucifer” by Agostino Arrivabene (1997)

This was my self-portrait but...the face remained a mystery to me...Then I understood that there was no face, he is condemned to Darkness. He is Lucifer, that means, bearer of light. That’s why I always light a candle to him. He absorbs light.

15. Acapella: “Texas Rangers” by Ian & Sylvia

Instrumental: “I Dream (for you)” by Com Truise

16. Dr. Sergey Samsonau (co-founder of Seeds of Science, AI technical lead at NYU, mad scientist, and dear friend) is hosting the 1st AImS (AI meets Science) conference in NYC on 4/26/24.

Call for Posters

We invite members of research groups in research universities across the wide NYC metro area to share their work with a broad NYC community of scholars interested in applying AI to problems in various fields of science. Researchers from the industry are also invited to participate and present!

It is Halloween so I made this for you.

All that is abominable is here. One thousand demons are here. May they bore into the back of your skull and nestle there. May they cackle and screech until you claw them out of there.

1. This guy (from Scott Alexander’s “Perpendicular Lives”):

Burkhard Heim is a hard man to describe, but—no, wait, “Nazi super-scientist with claws instead of hands” basically covers it. He is an easy man to describe. Very, very easy.

Heim was born in Germany in 1925. He was drafted into World War II, but soon transferred from the air force to a mad science division. His particular piece of mad science exploded, half-blinding him and destroying both his hands. His doctors performed the rare and controversial Krukenberg procedure, separating the radius and ulna to transform his stumps into claws. The advantage of this procedure is that the claws do still get tactile sensation, making it a good choice for blind double amputees without a lot of sensory options. The disadvantage is that you have claws instead of hands. I don't recommend Google Image searching this.

After the war, Heim studied physics at the University of Gottingen, where he compensated for his blindness by “acquiring an eidetic, acoustic memory”, and “found that intense concentration on the study of Einstein's relativity theory helped him control the pain in his arms mentally and physically”. His dissertation was - ironically - about the physics of the Crab Nebula.

Throughout the 1950s, he took the standard mad scientist career pathway - a little work at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, a stint advising Wernher von Braun, study of “six-dimensional meso-field equations” that permitted interplanetary travel in weeks or shorter - until he was hired by the Martin Company (later to become Lockheed-Martin) for their anti-gravity program. Wait, Lockheed-Martin had an anti-gravity program? Yes—and along with Heim it included Louis Witten (father of Edward Witten) and a person named “Welcome Bender IV”.

He also had links to the Gravity Research Foundation, one of my favorite foundations ever. The story begins with Roger Babson (previously mentioned here), a multimillionaire whose sister tragically fell in a river and drowned. While you or I might be tempted to devote our philanthropic efforts to river safety or local hospitals or something, Babson went straight to the source and declared war on gravity. No gravity, no falling into anything. He wrote an essay called “Gravity—Our Enemy Number One”, and founded the Gravity Research Foundation to pursue his crusade. This foundation may have been a little eccentric—“sometimes, [conference] attendees sat in chairs with their feet higher than their heads, to counterbalance gravity”—but they were basically competent and did good work. And one of the things they did was help publish and support Heim.

He went on in this vein for a while, but his sights were set higher than this: he wanted to create a unified field theory. He published what would become known as Extended Heim Theory in 1977, and for a while it was considered pretty exciting and plausible, though apparently more recent experiments contradict some of his predictions. He passed away in 2001, in his native Germany.

2. This dead rat:

APOCALYPSE NOW

3. Kierkegaard:

A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that's just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it’s a joke.

4. “Addicted to Cool” by Philip Kennicott

Early engineers talked about air conditioning in terms that sound odd today. They didn’t just want to cool interior space but to engineer ‘man-made weather.’ The ambition latent in that phrase connects the technology to the larger, modernist project, which conquered darkness, defied gravity, extended life and put humans on the moon and their proxies beyond. But in the end, the engineers were prescient. They did, indeed, manufacture human-made weather — with longer summers, hotter seas, more ferocious storms, and extremes of drought and flooding. Now we face a disconcerting future, as an indoor species. Mankind made his own weather, and now he must endure it. "So we dream of a new Promethean benefaction, to rescue us from the unintended side effects of his last gift. Perhaps solar power or renewable energy will offset the environmental costs of running a globe full of air conditioning. Perhaps air conditioning can be made more efficient, with new miracle desiccants — chemicals that dry air — reducing energy consumption. Maybe the whole globe can be cooled by pumping sulfuric acid into the stratosphere, to make the planet more reflective of the sun’s energy, thus engineering human-made weather on a planetary scale.

The new dream is an uneasy one and vastly different from the old one. We seek not an escape from bad weather or occasional respite from the long hot summer. We want to live beyond or without weather, because the weather we made is killing us.

This sounds like a job for the

5. The Center for Applied Eschatology:

Our Mission: to accelerate the world’s transition to non-being.

Our Vision: Imagine a world that doesn’t exist. That is our commitment.

Who We Are: The twenty-first century is unique in human history. At no other time has our species possessed more numerous and powerful means to end the world as we know it. The previous century gave us nuclear weapons; our own era adds new innovations — breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, nanotech, bioengineering, and other technologies — to the growing number of paths to anthropogenic apocalypse.

At present, it is difficult to estimate the likelihood of a global catastrophe. Researchers who study such scenarios vary in their conclusions. The best estimates place the chances of humanity surviving the present century somewhere between 9% and 50%.

​This is an unacceptable level of uncertainty. We can do better.

HORROR FICTION AND A WORD FROM OUR SPONSORS

6. “The Red Tower” by Thomas Ligotti

Despite their ostensibly mad or credulous origins, these testimonies, it seemed to me, deserved more than a cursory hearing.The legendary conflict between the factory and the grayish territory surrounding it may very well have been a fabrication of individuals who were lost in the advanced stages of either physical or psychic deterioration. Nonetheless, it was my theory, and remains so, that the Red Tower was not always that peculiar color for which it ultimately earned its fame. Thus the encrimsoning of the factory was a betrayal, a breaking-off, for it is my postulation that this ancient structure was in long-forgotten days the same pale hue as the world which encompassed it. Furthermore, with an insight born of dispassion to the point of total despair, I envisioned that the Red Tower was never solely devoted to the lowly functions of an ordinary factory.

new favorite word: encrimsoning

“The invincible human moth” by Erik Hoel

When I place the gun in his little hands I feel subtle tremors. Those are new, and I note them to myself as the boy, whose name is Tomas, brushes back the bangs that have grown long during the months we’ve been on the road. His face is pale and his eyes are very wide. He didn’t use to be this nervous when we did this. Months ago he would hold the gun and point it at me in toyish delight, utterly prepared and utterly faithful. He is beginning to suspect the truth. Perhaps he deduced it for himself, or simply read online about my methods.

“A creepy clown manifesto” by Sam Kriss

The forests have been strip-logged and grown back again worse, and the trees are just weeds now, white and narrow, branching out like pale spindly fingers: the rustling of trees outside your window at night is how you know that there’s someone in your house. These woods are all hollow inside, forests too young and splintered to hold anything like folklore, where nature looks like a cheap film set, where the nymphs and sprites would get trapped in Coke cans and starve, where every animal is mud-splattered, pre-butchered, and desperate. Since you stopped leaving pornography out here you have no use for these woods, and they have become a home for the clowns. They suit us fine. Our evil is not ancient; we are depthless and outside of history.

7. Some previous posts of mine that pair well with spooky season:

Word and Wheel (fiction)

The Eden Project (fiction)

Living and Dying with a Mad God (non-fiction)

Spooky Season ‘22 (last year’s links post, not nearly as spooky)

NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST NOW

8. Long-term nuclear waste warning messages:

Long-term nuclear waste warning messages are communication attempts intended to deter human intrusion at nuclear waste repositories in the far future, within or above the order of magnitude of 10,000 years.

A 1993 report from Sandia National Laboratories recommended that such messages be constructed at several levels of complexity. They suggested that the sites should include forbidding physical features which would immediately convey to future visitors that the site was both man-made and dangerous, as well as providing pictographic information attempting to convey some details of the danger, and written explanations for those able to read it.

A 1993 report from Sandia National Laboratories aimed to communicate a series of messages non-linguistically to any future visitors to a waste site. It gave the following wording as an example of what those messages should evoke:

This place is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it!

Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.

This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.

What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.

The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us.

The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.

The danger is to the body, and it can kill.

The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.

The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.

To determine how to convey long-term nuclear warning messages, the Zeitschrift für Semiotik (Tübingen, Germany) issued a poll in 1982 and 1983 asking how a message might be communicated for a duration of 10,000 years. The poll asked the following question: "How would it be possible to inform our descendants for the next 10,000 years about the storage locations and dangers of radioactive waste?" leading to the following answers:

An atomic priesthood:

The linguist Thomas Sebeok was a member of the Bechtel working group. Building on earlier suggestions made by Alvin Weinberg and Arsen Darnay he proposed the creation of an atomic priesthood, a panel of experts where members would be replaced through nominations by a council. Similar to the Catholic church – which has preserved and authorized its message for almost 2,000 years – the atomic priesthood would have to preserve the knowledge about locations and dangers of radioactive waste by creating rituals and myths. The priesthood would indicate off-limits areas and the consequences of disobedience.

“ray cats”:

French author Françoise Bastide and the Italian semiotician Paolo Fabbri proposed the breeding of so-called “radiation cats” or “ray cats”. Cats have a long history of cohabitation with humans, and this approach assumes that their domestication will continue indefinitely. These radiation cats would change significantly in color when they came near radioactive emissions and serve as living indicators of danger.

To transport the message, the importance of the cats would need to be set in the collective awareness through fairy tales and myths. Those fairy tales and myths in turn could be transmitted through poetry, music and painting. As a response, the podcast 99% Invisible commissioned musician Emperor X to write a song about ray cats for a 2014 episode about long-term nuclear waste warning messages. The song, called “10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories (Don't Change Color, Kitty)”, was designed to be “so catchy and annoying that it might be handed down from generation to generation over a span of 10,000 years”.

REPTILIAN NIGHTMARES

9. Science Magazine: “Crocodiles are alarmingly attuned to the cries of human babies”

Whether they’re in mortal peril or just suffering from indigestion, infants across the animal kingdom cry out to tell their parents they need help. Unfortunately for them, the parents aren’t the only ones attuned to the cries of their vulnerable young. Nile crocodiles are uniquely sensitive to the wails of distressed primate babies, according to a new study—and the more anxious the cry, the more interested the crocs become.

See also: “Manhunt Launched for Giant Crocodile That Ate 1-Year-Old in Front of Father”

BORGES

10. Excerpt from “The Immortal”:

Nine doors opened into that cellar- like place; eight led to a maze that returned, deceitfully, to the same chamber; the ninth led through another maze to a second circular chamber identical to the first. I am not certain how many chambers there were; my misery and anxiety multiplied them. The silence was hostile, and virtually perfect; aside from a subterranean wind whose cause I never discovered, within those deep webs of stone there was no sound; even the thin streams of iron-colored water that trickled through crevices in the stone were noiseless. Horribly, I grew used to that dubious world; it began to seem incredible that anything could exist save nine-doored cellars and long, forking subterranean corridors. I know not how long I wandered under the earth; I do know that from time to time, in a confused dream of home, I conflated the horrendous village of the barbarians and the city of my birth, among the clusters of grapes.

The impression of great antiquity was joined by others: the impression of endlessness, the sensation of oppressiveness and horror, the sensation of complex irrationality. I had made my way through a dark maze, but it was the bright City of the Immortals that terrified and repelled me. A maze is a house built purposely to confuse men; its architecture, prodigal in symmetries, is made to serve that purpose. In the palace that I imperfectly explored, the architecture had no purpose. There were corridors that led nowhere, unreachably high windows, grandly dramatic doors that opened onto monklike cells or empty shafts, incredible upside-down staircases with upside-down treads and balustrades. Other staircases, clinging airily to the side of a monumental wall, petered out after two or three landings, in the high gloom of the cupolas, arriving nowhere. I cannot say whether these are literal examples I have given; I do know that for many years they plagued my troubled dreams; I can no longer know whether any given feature is a faithful transcription of reality or one of the shapes unleashed by my nights. This City, I thought, is so horrific that its mere existence, the mere fact of its having endured — even in the middle of a secret desert — pollutes the past and the future and somehow compromises the stars. So long as this City endures, no one in the world can ever be happy or courageous. I do not want to describe it; a chaos of heterogeneous words, the body of a tiger or a bull pullulating with teeth, organs, and heads monstrously yoked together yet hating each other — those might, perhaps, be approximate images.

MISCELLANEOUS PAIN, SADNESS, AND DEATH

11. The Capuchin Crypt:

The Capuchin Crypt is a small space comprising several tiny chapels located beneath the church of Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini on the Via Veneto near Piazza Barberini in Rome, Italy. It contains the skeletal remains of 3,700 bodies believed to be Capuchin friars buried by their order.[1] The Catholic order insists that the display is not meant to be macabre, but a silent reminder of the swift passage of life on Earth and our own mortality.

As friars died during the lifetime of the crypt, the longest-buried friar was exhumed to make room for the newly deceased who was buried without a coffin, and the newly reclaimed bones were added to the decorative motifs. Bodies typically spent 30 years decomposing in the soil, before being exhumed.

12. Two words from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows:

Olēka: the awareness of how few days are memorable. Intertwined with all that we have missed is the opposite (but also possibly disheartening) feeling of how little we’ve gained. Do you ever recall the weeks leading up to a holiday, or were they just obstacles or empty dates waiting to be crossed out and forgotten? What was the last thing you said to your friend? What did you eat for dinner this day last week?

Achenia: the maddening sense that the world is too complex to even begin to understand, that whenever you try to answer even the most trivial question, it quickly tangles into a thicket of complications and melts into a quicksand of nuance, leaving you flailing for something solid to hold on to, struggling to come up with anything you could say that is definitively 100 percent true.

13. STOP THE PRESSES: “Dying to die: New micro and macro evidence that suicide terrorists are suicidal” (Varaine, 2023)

14. Science Magazine: “Humans will trade pain for useless information”

People often go great lengths to earn a reward—no pain, no gain, as the saying goes. A new study published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B suggests that many will also go to great lengths for functionally worthless information, showing a willingness to endure physical pain for information about the value of a monetary reward, even when that information won’t affect its value.

(…so what you are doing right now basically)

SPOOKY VINTAGE HALLOWEEN COSTUMES

Halloween has been defanged, emasculated and enfeebled.

Too many disney princesses and sexy nurses…

Too many shits n’ giggles…

Halloween should be the worst day of the year.

Halloween should be a time of FEAR and LOATHING and existential DESPAIR.

Halloween should be a time of meaningless AGONY, abject MISERY, and cosmic EVIL.

Halloween should be the day when you drench yourself in pig blood and play dead in the middle of the sidewalk until a paramedic comes to check if you have a pulse and then you SCREAM in their face and scare them SHITLESS.

Halloween should be the day when you wear a BEAR suit and kidnap a BABY and take WEIRD pictures with that BABY in a FIELD and then return that BABY with a THANK YOU note and a $13 GIFT CARD to STARBUCKS.

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This blog is a labor of love. I do not charge for any of this sizzling hot content and I have decided I never will. Paywalls cannot and should not contain the Bacon; Bacon is for the people, by the people. But if you derive any enjoyment or value from what I post on here, I would ask two small favors: (1) share Secretorum with a friend, and (2) send me any articles/poems/quotes/art/music/whatever that you think I might enjoy and would want to feature on a future links post (and of course you will be credited along with any personal links to blogs/websites you would like to include). I will warn you though: the bar is high. As for what I’m looking for, anything that is truly strange, beautiful, grotesque, macabre, thought-provoking, humorous, or otherwise notable (you can reach me at rogersbacon17 at gmail.com).

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THE STRANGE, THE BEAUTIFUL, THE GROTESQUE

1. Artist: Konstantin Korobov

2. Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

3. Photography by Angelica Ramirez

4. Your new favorite drug:

Jenkem is a inhalant and hallucinogen created from fermented human waste. In the mid-1990s, it was reported to be a popular street drug among Zambian youth.

In November 2007, there was a moral panic in the United States after widespread reports of jenkem becoming a popular recreational drug in middle and high schools across the country, though the true extent of the practice has since been called into question. Several sources reported that the increase in American media coverage was based on a hoax and on faulty Internet research.

The name derives from Genkem, a brand of glues which had “become the generic name for all the glues used by glue-sniffing children” in South Africa, where the drug originated and is most popular on the African continent today. In the book Children of AIDS: Africa's Orphan Crisis by Emma Guest, the making of jenkem is described: “fermented human sewage, scraped from pipes and stored in plastic bags for a week or so, until it gives off numbing, intoxicating fumes.” The process is similarly described in a 1995 IPS report: “Human excreta is scooped up from the edges of the sewer ponds in old cans and containers which are covered with a polyethylene bag and left to stew or ferment for a week.”

The effects of jenkem inhalation supposedly last for around an hour and consist of auditory and visual hallucinations for some users. A 1999 report interviewed a user, who said, “With glue, I just hear voices in my head. But with jenkem, I see visions. I see my mother who is dead and I forget about the problems in my life.”

5. From the Himalayan art exhibit at the Rubin Museum (NYC):

6. Herodotus (c. 484 – c. 425 BC):

“The storm lasted three days, after which the Magi brought it to an end by sacrificial offerings, and by putting spells on the wind, and by further offerings to Thetis and the sea-nymphs—or, of course, it may be that the wind just dropped naturally.”

THE SAD

7. Two words from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows:

Yù Yī (ancient Chinese): the longing to feel things intensely again.

This intensity of experience is abundant in our younger years—when we laughed hard, were filled with excitement, and felt completely carefree. And in the earliest stage of life, as infants, so much of our surroundings filled us with fascination. Intense feelings when we’re young make sense since this is when we’re exposed to so many new things. More routine and familiarity as we age might mean we don’t feel as intensely as often, but there will be instances when we are jolted awake from our routine and feel childhood sensations again.

Mono no aware (Japanese): The deep pathos inherent in all things because they are fleeting and ephemeral. A beautiful sadness in the passing of lives and objects. The bittersweet impermanence of autumn leaves, falling cherry blossoms, passing seasons, youth, romance, life.

8. Extinguished by Miles Johnston

THE READING, THE MATH, THE SCIENCE

9. “Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born”: enjoyed this a lot, many interesting reflections on the nature of creativity. The essay discusses the lives and creative processes of the Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman and the French mathematician Alexander Grothendieck. If you don’t know about Grothendieck (or even if you do know the broad strokes), I highly recommend this biographical essay—buckle up, it’s a wildddd ride.

Alexander Grothendieck started out as the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century, and ended up as a destitute hermit, lost in a labyrinth of ideas, dreams and maybe delusions that we still haven’t been able to decipher.

10. Surname Diversity, Social Ties and Innovation:

We study whether interactions between individuals with different skills, expertise and perspectives influenced innovation in U.S. counties from 1850 to 1940. We introduce and validate a new measure of social interactional diversity based on the distribution of surnames: lower surname diversity indicates more concentrated social interactions among like-minded people. Leveraging quasi-random variation in counties' surname compositions—stemming from the interplay between historical fluctuations in immigration and local factors that attract immigrants—we find that surname diversity increases both the quantity and quality of innovation. The results support the view that social interactions between diverse minds are key drivers of innovation.

11. This is the picture on the Wikipedia page for “Psychologist”; so many questions, so few answers…

12. “AI and the Doctor Dolittle challenge”:

Talking to animals is a fundamental human desire. The emergence of powerful AI algorithms, and specifically Large Language Models, has driven many to suggest that we are on the verge of fulfilling this wish. A few large scientific consortia have been formed around this topic and several commercial entities even offer such services. We frame the task of communicating with animals as ‘The Doctor Dolittle challenge’ and identify three main obstacles on the route to doing so. First, although generative AI models can create novel animal communication samples, it is very difficult to determine their context, and we will forever be biased by our human umwelt when doing so. Second, using AI to extract context in an unsupervised manner must be validated through controlled experiments aiming to measure the animals’ response. This is difficult, and moreover, AI algorithms tend to cling on to any available information and are thus prone to finding spurious correlations. And third, animal communication focuses on a restricted set of contexts, such as alarm and courtship, highly limiting our ability to communicate regarding other contexts. Nevertheless, using the tremendous power of novel AI methods to decipher and mimic animal communication is both fascinating and important. We thus define the criteria for passing the Doctor Dolittle challenge and call upon scientists to take on the mission.

I’m reminded of one of my favorite Ted Chiang short stories, “The Great Silence”

13. “To reverse engineer an entire nervous system” (aka The Worminator Project):

There are many theories of how behavior may be controlled by neurons. Testing and refining these theories would be greatly facilitated if we could correctly simulate an entire nervous system so we could replicate the brain dynamics in response to any stimuli or contexts. Besides, simulating a nervous system is in itself one of the big dreams in systems neuroscience. However, doing so requires us to identify how each neuron's output depends on its inputs, a process we call reverse engineering. Current efforts at this focus on the mammalian nervous system, but these brains are mind-bogglingly complex, allowing only recordings of tiny subsystems. Here we argue that the time is ripe for systems neuroscience to embark on a concerted effort to reverse engineer a smaller system and that Caenorhabditis elegans is the ideal candidate system as the established optophysiology techniques can capture and control each neuron’s activity and scale to hundreds of thousands of experiments. Data across populations and behaviors can be combined because across individuals the nervous system is largely conserved in form and function. Modern machine-learning based modeling should then enable a simulation of C. elegans’ impressive breadth of brain states and behaviors. The ability to reverse engineer an entire nervous system will benefit the design of artificial intelligence systems and all of systems neuroscience, enabling fundamental insights as well as new approaches for investigations of progressively larger nervous systems.

THE BORGES

14. Writing advice:

“A good sentence in English has a structure that begins with the second most important element, moves to the least important element, and ends with the strongest element. The pattern is 2-3-1.”

15. A (very) short story, “Ragnarök”:

In our dreams (writes Coleridge) images represent the sensations we think they cause; we do not feel horror because we are threatened by a sphinx ; we dream a sphinx in order to explain the horror we feel. If this is so, how could a mere chronicle of its forms transmit the stupor, the exaltation, the alarm, the menace and the jubilance which made up the fabric of that dream that night? I shall attempt such a chronicle, however; perhaps the fact that the dream was composed of one single scene may remove or mitigate this essential difficulty.

The place was the School of Philosophy and Letters; the time, toward sundown. Everything (as usually happens in dreams) was somehow different; a slight magnification altered things. We were electing officials: I was talking with Pedro Henríquez Ureña, who in the world of waking reality died many years ago. Suddenly we were stunned by the clamor of a demonstration or disturbance. Human and animal cries came from the Bajo. A voice shouted “Here they come!” and then “The Gods! The Gods!” Four or five individuals emerged from the mob and occupied the platform of the main lecture hall. We all applauded, tearfully; these were the Gods returning from a centuries-long exile. Made larger by the platform, their heads thrown back and their chests thrust forward, they arrogantly received our homage. One held a branch which no doubt conformed to the simple botany of dreams; another, in a broad gesture, extended his hand which was a claw; one of the faces of Janus looked with distrust at the curved beak of Thoth. Perhaps aroused by our applause, one of them — I know longer know which — erupted in a victorious clatter, unbelievably harsh, with something of a gargle and of a whistle. From that moment, things changed.

It all began with the suspicion (perhaps exaggerated) that the Gods did not know how to talk. Centuries of fell and fugitive life had atrophied the human element in them; the moon of Islam and the cross of Rome had been implacable with these outlaws. Very low foreheads, yellow teeth, stringy mulatto or Chinese mustaches and thick bestial lips showed the degeneracy of the Olympian lineage. Their clothing corresponded not to a decorous poverty but rather to the sinister luxury of the gambling houses and brothels of the Bajo. A carnation bled crimson on a lapel and the bulge of a knife was outlined beneath a close-fitting jacket. Suddenly we sensed that they were playing their last card, that they were cunning, ignorant and cruel like old beasts of prey and that, if we let ourselves be overcome by fear or pity, they would finally destroy us.

We took out our heavy revolvers (all of a sudden there were revolvers in the dream) and joyfully killed the Gods.

16. Artist: INFINITEYAY

THE MUSIC

17. Beats Antique - Three Sisters (feat. Tatyana Kalmykova)

18. Flying Lotus - Crust

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The Seeds of Science

Seeds of Science (ISSN: 2768-1254) is a journal publishing speculative and non-traditional scientific articles - visit TheSeedsofScience.org to learn more.

1. This hyper-realistic drawing of a kidney by sfkhanvisuals:

2. Absolutely genius; preprint here.

We propose a new standard for writing author names on papers and in bibliographies, which places every author as a first author — superimposed. This approach enables authors to write papers as true equals, without any advantage given to whoever’s name happens to come first alphabetically (for example). We develop the technology for implementing this standard in LaTeX, BibTex, and HTML; show several examples; and discuss further

3. Did Scientists Accidentally Invent an Anti-addiction Drug?

People taking Ozempic for weight loss say they have also stopped drinking, smoking, shopping, and even nail biting.

4. Dunitz’s Rule: “Almost every scientific publication can be improved by cutting out the first sentence”.

5. The Vesuvius Challenge

Resurrect an ancient library from the ashes of a volcano. Win $1,000,000. The Vesuvius Challenge is a machine learning and computer vision competition to read the Herculaneum Papyri.

In Herculaneum, twenty meters of hot mud and ash bury an enormous villa once owned by the father-in-law of Julius Caesar. Inside, there is a vast library of papyrus scrolls.

The scrolls are carbonized by the heat of the volcanic debris. But they are also preserved. For centuries, as virtually every ancient text exposed to the air decays and disappears, the library of the Villa of the Papyri waits underground, intact.While digging a well, an Italian farmworker encounters a marble pavement. Excavations unearth beautiful statues and frescoes – and hundreds of scrolls. Carbonized and ashen, they are extremely fragile. But the temptation to open them is great; if read, they would more than double the corpus of literature we have from antiquity.

Early attempts to open the scrolls unfortunately destroy many of them. A few are painstakingly unrolled by an Italian monk over several decades, and they are found to contain philosophical texts written in Greek. More than six hundred remain unopened and unreadable. What's more, excavations were never completed, and many historians believe that thousands more scrolls remain underground.

Imagine the secrets of Roman and Greek philosophy, science, literature, mathematics, poetry, and politics, which are locked away in these lumps of ash, waiting to be read!

6. New peer-reviewed articles from Seeds of Science:

We See The Sacred From Afar, To See It The Same by Robin Hanson

Principles of Categorization: a Synthesis by Davood Gozli

Perspective: Focused-Ultrasound Guided Neuropeptide Delivery as a Novel Therapeutic Approach in Psychiatry by Manjushri Karthikeyan, Ahaana Shrivastava, and Andrew Neff

7. New from the SoS “Best of Science Blogging” feed:

What should science cost? Hacking the economics of scientific equipment by David Lang

Why do most popular science books suck? by Erik Hoel

The Alien ER and the Amyloid Hypothesis by Shane Horan

Time for a Change: How Scientific Publishing is Changing For The Better

Bombs, Brains, and Science by Eric Gilliam

The Need for Long-term Research by Kevin Kelly (featuring an extended comment from yours truly with some speculation on what such projects might be)

How many people die from snakebites? Saloni Dattani

Underrated ideas in psychology by Adam Mastroianni

Ideas aren’t getting harder to find and anyone who tells you otherwise is a coward and I will fight them by Adam Mastroianni

8. Artist: Christian Rex Van Minnen (I can't find the title, but I’m calling it “Technicolor Rainbow Frog Egg Man”)

9. Discovery of facultative parthenogenesis in a new world crocodile

Over the past two decades, there has been an astounding growth in the documentation of vertebrate facultative parthenogenesis (FP). This unusual reproductive mode has been documented in birds, non-avian reptiles—specifically lizards and snakes—and elasmobranch fishes. Part of this growth among vertebrate taxa is attributable to awareness of the phenomenon itself and advances in molecular genetics/genomics and bioinformatics, and as such our understanding has developed considerably. Nonetheless, questions remain as to its occurrence outside of these vertebrate lineages, most notably in Chelonia (turtles) and Crocodylia (crocodiles, alligators and gharials). The latter group is particularly interesting because unlike all previously documented cases of FP in vertebrates, crocodilians lack sex chromosomes and sex determination is controlled by temperature. Here, using whole-genome sequencing data, we provide, to our knowledge, the first evidence of FP in a crocodilian, the American crocodile, Crocodylus acutus.

10. Parasite gives wolves what it takes to be pack leaders

“Wolves infected with a parasite that commonly infects cats were 46 times more likely to become pack leaders and 11 times more likely to start a new pack…The parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, makes its hosts bold — a mechanism that increases its survival.”

11. Artist: Vertigo

12. Recommended reading for young (and old!) biologists: “Is the cell really a machine?” by Daniel J. Nicholson

It has become customary to conceptualize the living cell as an intricate piece of machinery, different to a man-made machine only in terms of its superior complexity. This familiar understanding grounds the conviction that a cell's organization can be explained reductionistically, as well as the idea that its molecular pathways can be construed as deterministic circuits. The machine conception of the cell owes a great deal of its success to the methods traditionally used in molecular biology. However, the recent introduction of novel experimental techniques capable of tracking individual molecules within cells in real time is leading to the rapid accumulation of data that are inconsistent with an engineering view of the cell. This paper examines four major domains of current research in which the challenges to the machine conception of the cell are particularly pronounced: cellular architecture, protein complexes, intracellular transport, and cellular behaviour. It argues that a new theoretical understanding of the cell is emerging from the study of these phenomena which emphasizes the dynamic, self-organizing nature of its constitution, the fluidity and plasticity of its components, and the stochasticity and non-linearity of its underlying processes.

13. Alien-looking viruses discovered in Massachusetts forest (I continue to be horrified/fascinated by giant viruses)

Giant viruses can exceed 2 micrometers in diameter, on par with some bacteria. They can also harbor immense genomes, which reach 2.5 megabases—larger than the genomes of far more complex organisms. Between the discovery of these impressively sized viruses in algae and the culturing of amoeba-infecting Mimiviruses, most of the research on the group has focused on viruses that inhabit freshwater environments. But DNA sequencing has long indicated that giant viruses are diverse and abundant elsewhere, too—especially in sediments and soils, which are estimated to host some 97% of all the viral particles on Earth. Indeed, genomic sequencing of the soils of Harvard Forest—a roughly 16-square-kilometer area west of Boston—indicated the presence of numerous, novel giant viruses.

Now, electron microscopy has allowed scientists to see what others had only sequenced. The diversity of forms was astounding, they report in a bioRxiv preprint. Not only did the researchers see the 20-sided icosahedral shapes they expected, they spotted ones with myriad modifications—tails, altered points, and multilayered or channeled structures abounded. There were even viruses with long tubular appendages, which the team dubbed “Gorgon” morphology (above). Furthermore, many of these putative viral particles were coated with almost hairlike projections, which varied in length, thickness, density, and shape.

14. Some personal Seeds of Science-related updates:

(1) At the beginning of March, I, along with SoS co-founder Dr. Dario Krpan, participated in a panel discussion at the London School of Economics, “Different Perspectives on Diversity of Thought in Social Science”. We spoke about how we can encourage greater diversity of thought by reconsidering norms around scientific writing/publishing and by finding more ways to get amateurs and independent researchers involved in social science research. A short commentary on the event that mentions Seeds of Science was featured in the Lancet (of all places lol).

The point of this journal, founded by Roger’s Bacon (a pseudonym) and Dario Krpan, is to provide a place where people outside the system of science can publish their findings, ideas, and views. Roger’s Bacon identified two neglected aspects of diversity. First, psychological diversity. We live in environments that shape our minds. The academic environment privileges particular characteristics: diligence, competitiveness, verbal abilities, organisational skills, quantitative expertise, self-promotion. What about those who do not possess these qualities? Are they to be excluded from science? Second, functional diversity. We think of ourselves as free agents, but the settings we work in impose incentives and constraints that limit our freedom. To promote psychological and functional diversity, we must create possibilities for non-traditional scientists, amateurs, to contribute.

(2) Nurturing Non-Traditional Science, a podcast interview with yours truly.

As a former biologist turned independent researcher and teacher, Roger and his team created this new journal to address the many issues around gatekeeping and review in scientific publishing. In this conversation, he and Sarah talk about reviewing speculative research, stewarding a community, and the aesthetic value of communication.

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1. Artist: RedruM

2. A strange and ghastly tale:

Craniopagus parasiticus is an extremely rare type of parasitic twinning occurring in about 2 to 3 of 5,000,000 births. In craniopagus parasiticus, a parasitic twin head with an undeveloped body is attached to the head of a developed twin. Fewer than a dozen cases of this type of conjoined twin have been documented in literature.

From “The Two-Headed Boy of Bengal” (emphasis mine):

In May 1783, in a small village named Mundul Gaut, in Bengal, India, a strange child was born. He had two heads.

The midwife assisting the birth was so horrified by the child's appearance that she tried to kill the monstrosity by throwing him into the fire. Fortunately, the baby was rescued with some burns in one eye and ear. The parents, after recovering from the initial shock, began to see the newborn as a money making opportunity, and with that in mind, left their village for Calcutta where their deformed baby could be exhibited.

Between shows, to prevent the crowd from taking a peek without paying, his parents kept the unfortunate child hidden, usually under a sheet, sometimes for hours at a time. As his fame spread across India, several nobleman, civil servants and city officials invited the child and his parents to their homes for private exhibitions, where their guests could examine the curious specimen up close. One of these observers was a Colonel Pierce who described the encounter to the President of the Royal Society, Sir Joseph Banks and it was Sir Banks who later forwarded the account to the surgeon Everard Home.

The second head had a few irregularities— the ears were malformed, the tongue was small, and the lower jaw was rather small, but otherwise both heads were of the same size, and were covered by black hair at their junction. Both heads seemed to function independently. When the child cried or smiled, the features of the upper head were not always affected and did not match the emotion of the child. When the child slept, the second head might be awake and its eyes moving as if observing the surrounding.

The second head reacted to external stimulus; a pinch in the cheek produced a grimace, and when it was given the breast, its lips attempted to suck. It also produced plenty of tears and saliva.

One day when the child was 4 years old, his mother left him alone to fetch water. When she returned, she found the child dead by the bite of a cobra. Many anatomists offered to buy the corpse, but the religious parents could not allow such desecration. The child was buried near the Boopnorain River, outside the city of Tumloch, but his grave was robbed by Mr. Dent, a salt agent for the East India Company. He dissected the putrefied body and gave the skull to a Captain Buchanan of the East Indian Company. The captain later brought the skull to England and gave it to his friend Everard Home. The skull of the Boy of Bengal can still be seen at the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of London.

One can only hope that Mr. Dent and Mr. Home and/or their descendants suffered terrible misfortune.

When Mr. Dent dissected the heads, he discovered that the brains were separate and distinct. Each brain was firmly covered in its own dura mater and was supplied by large vessels which delivered nutrition to the upper head.

I can’t trace it back to the original source but some of the articles/posts floating around on the internet claim that, “The boy claimed he could hear the other brain telling him things.”

3. The best version of the trolley problem

4. The art and life of Forrest Bess:

Forrest Clemenger Bess (October 5, 1911 – November 10, 1977) was an American painter and fisherman. He was discovered and promoted by the art dealer Betty Parsons. He is known for his abstract, symbol-laden paintings based on what he called “visions.”

In the 1950s, he also began a lifelong correspondence with art professor and author Meyer Schapiro and sexologist John Money. In these and other letters (which were donated to the Smithsonian Archives of American Art) Bess makes it clear that his paintings were only part of a grander theory, based on alchemy, the philosophy of Carl Jung, and the rituals of Australian aborigines, which proposed that becoming a hermaphrodite was the key to immortality. He was never able to win any converts to his theories or validation from the many doctors and psychologists with whom he corresponded. In his own home town of Bay City, he was considered something of a small-town eccentric.

The events of the night in 1955 or the late 1950s on which Forrest Bess became a pseudo-hermaphrodite are not clear. According to Bess, he paid a local physician, Dr. R. H. Jackson, $100 and several paintings to perform the necessary surgery. Sex researcher Dr. John Money later corresponded at length with Bess and concluded that Bess, who exhibited an extensive knowledge of anatomy, medical procedures and painkilling drugs, had operated on himself and invented the doctor's participation to legitimize his experiment. The doctor apparently did attend Bess on the night in question. Jackson died shortly after supposedly performing a second operation on Bess in late 1961.

The anatomical facts, however, are clear. In accordance with the aborigine ritual, an opening or fistula was created beneath Bess's penis at its junction with the scrotum. This opening led through an incision in the urethra to the bulbocavernous urethra, a naturally enlarged section of the urethra that Bess insisted was capable of intense orgasmic stimulation. According to Bess's theories, the bulbous section of the urethra could, if sufficiently dilated, receive another penis in what would be the ultimate, eternally rejuvenating form of sexual intercourse. This physical manifestation of his theory never achieved the results he had hoped for and this quest for immortality was the beginning of a slow decline in both his health and his creative output.

5. The comic book art of Philippe Druillet

6. “Inferno I, 32” by Jorge Luis Borges

From the half-light of dawn to the half-light of evening, the eyes of a leopard, in the last years of the twelfth century, looked upon a few wooden boards, some vertical iron bars, some varying men and women, a blank wall, and perhaps a stone gutter littered with dry leaves. The leopard did not know, could not know, that it yearned for love and cruelty and the hot pleasure of tearing flesh and a breeze with the scent of deer, but something inside it was suffocating and howling in rebellion, and God spoke to it in a dream: You shall live and die in this prison, so that a man that I have knowledge of may see you a certain number of times and never forget you and put your figure and your symbol into a poem, which has its exact place in the weft of the universe. You suffer captivity, but you shall have given a word to the poem. In the dream, God illuminated the animal's rude understanding and the animal grasped the reasons and accepted its fate, but when it awoke there was only an obscure resignation in it, a powerful ignorance, because the machine of the world is exceedingly complex for the simplicity of a savage beast. 

Years later, Dante was to die in Ravenna, as unjustified and alone as any other man. In a dream, God told him the secret purpose of his life and work; Dante, astonished, learned at last who he was and what he was, and he blessed the bitternesses of his life. Legend has it that when he awoke, he sensed that he had received and lost an infinite thing, something he would never be able to recover, or even to descry from afar, because the machine of the world is exceedingly complex for the simplicity of men.

7. Book Review: Geography of Madness - Scott Alexander at his best.

Around the wide world, all cultures share a few key features. Anthropologists debate the precise extent, but the basics are always there. Language. Tools. Marriage. Family. Ritual. Music. And penis-stealing witches.

8. What’s a tumblr post that’s so embedded in your head that you can’t help but make shorthand reference to in real life? For me it’s this one

9. Sleep by Haruki Murakami - really enjoyed this one, best short story I’ve read in a while.

10. Artist: Chewy Stoll

11. The Temples of Humankind and the Federation of Damanhur

The Temples of Humankind are a collection of subterranean temples buried 30 metres (100 ft) underground built by the Federation of Damanhur. They are decorated in several motifs stressing peaceful human collaboration. The Temples are located in the foothills of the Alps in northern Italy, 50 kilometres (30 mi) from Turin, in the valley of Valchiusella.

The temples were created under the direction of Oberto Airaudi who, having claimed visions of ancient temples at age 10 from a previous life, began excavation and building in August 1978. By 1991 most of the chambers were reportedly complete when Italian police, acting on a tip from villagers, conducted a raid on the Temples. However, since the temples were so well hidden, police were unable to locate them until state prosecutor Bruno Tinti threatened “show us these temples or we will dynamite the entire hillside.” Eventually the Italian government reportedly gave them retroactive excavation and erection privileges and the Temples are now open to visitors.

The Federation of Damanhur, often called simply Damanhur, is a commune, ecovillage, and spiritual community situated in the Piedmont region of northern Italy about 50 kilometres (31 mi) north of the city of Turin. Damanhur is named after the Egyptian city of Damanhur which was the site of a temple dedicated to Horus. It was founded in 1975 by Oberto Airaudi with around 24 followers, and by 2000 the number had grown to 800. The group holds a mix of New Age and neopagan beliefs.

The constitution began with 3 bodies of Damanhur: The School of Meditation (ritual tradition) Social (social theory, social realization) and The Game of Life (experimentation and dynamics, life as a game, change). A fourth body was recently added, Technarcate (individual inner refinement).

Citizens participate in one of 4 levels, depending on their desired involvement: A, B, C, or D. Class A citizens share all resources and live on site full-time. Class B citizens contribute to financial goals and live on site a minimum of 3 days a week. Class C and D citizens live anywhere. (page 102, Merrifield, 2006) Class A & B citizens participate fully in The School of Meditation, Social, and the Game of Life. Class C citizens participate fully in The School of Meditation.

Citizens participate in one of several ways, depending on their personal nature. Ways include the Way of the Oracle, the Way of the Monk, the Way of the Knight, the Way of Health, the Way of the Word, the Way of Art & Work, and many others. Most citizens live in houses of 10-20 people each, federated together into the Federation of Damanhur.

Marriage works on a renewal basis, for a period of so many years before renewal. Conception is timed for auspicious birthdays of children.

From 1983 onwards, members have assumed animal names (Sparrow, Prawn, Mole, etc.).

12. From the journal of Sylvia Plath

“God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of “parties” with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter—they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.”

13. Shintaro Kago

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From “Why headhunting men’s cults develop in lowland riverine rainforest areas” on the Asmat hunter-gatherers of New Guinea:

The heads are a ‘currency’ which older males use to ‘pay’ for the initiation of their young male relatives into the men’s group. Second, multiple clans often cooperate on these headhunting expeditions, and thus fight over the spoils (though fights over the spoils can also reflect feasting dynamics, gifts owed, or existing social conflicts, so it’s more complex than just a direct fight over the head alone). Third, acquiring heads benefits the men who seize them, as well as their lineage through initiating their relatives.

It’s worth repeating that the initiate given the name in these ceremonies did not kill the victim himself, but it was likely an older male relative of his that did so. The relatives of the victim embracing someone who is essentially their enemy is quite striking: though of course, they probably didn’t see it that way. The designation of the name meant that some aspect of the spirit of the headhunting victim was from then on associated with the initiate, making the relatives’ embrace of the individual from the enemy group perfectly sensible. While they may have sought revenge against the group and the individual who did the killing, the young man who received their dead relative’s name represented a piece of him living on, and thus warranted being treated as kin.

And the owl ceremony of the Selk’nam of Tierra del Fuego from “Cutting the Chord”:

The remainder of the umbilical cord is left to dry on the newborn child, until it falls off by itself. The mother rolls it up into a little ring and carefully stores it in a small leather pouch. Only when the child can walk independently does the father catch a small wood owl. While he clasps the bird with both hands, the child takes from its mother's hand its own navel cord and places it around the neck of the animal. Then the father puts the wood owl into the child's hands. All who are standing around watch him until, after a short while, the child lets this little bird with the navel cord around its neck fly away.

2. These costumes from Sardinia and Sicily that William shared on twitter:

3. We can now engineer virus-resistant organisms (what could possibly go wrong?!?!?). From the abstract of “A swapped genetic code prevents viral infections and gene transfer”:

Engineering the genetic code of an organism has been proposed to provide a firewall from natural ecosystems by preventing viral infections and gene transfer. However, numerous viruses and mobile genetic elements encode parts of the translational apparatus, potentially rendering a genetic-code-based firewall ineffective. Here we show that such mobile transfer RNAs (tRNAs) enable gene transfer and allow viral replication in Escherichia coli despite the genome-wide removal of 3 of the 64 codons and the previously essential cognate tRNA and release factor genes. We then establish a genetic firewall by discovering viral tRNAs that provide exceptionally efficient codon reassignment allowing us to develop cells bearing an amino acid-swapped genetic code that reassigns two of the six serine codons to leucine during translation. This amino acid-swapped genetic code renders cells resistant to viral infections by mistranslating viral proteomes and prevents the escape of synthetic genetic information by engineered reliance on serine codons to produce leucine-requiring proteins. As these cells may have a selective advantage over wild organisms due to virus resistance, we also repurpose a third codon to biocontain this virus-resistant host through dependence on an amino acid not found in nature. Our results may provide the basis for a general strategy to make any organism safely resistant to all natural viruses and prevent genetic information flow into and out of genetically modified organisms.

4. The delightfully grotesque art of Nick Sheehy:

5. unstoppable

6. I shared this before, but it’s too good not to share again—I absolutely love this animated film (13 minutes) and can’t recommend it highly enough.

7. This month in weird psychological phenomenon:

• Dissociative fugue

Formerly called a fugue state or psychogenic fugue, dissociative fugue is a mental and behavioral disorder that is classified variously as a dissociative disorder, a conversion disorder, and a somatic symptom disorder. The disorder is a rare psychiatric phenomenon characterized by reversible amnesia for one's identity, including the memories, personality, and other identifying characteristics of individuality. The state can last for days, months, or longer. Dissociative fugue usually involves unplanned travel or wandering and is sometimes accompanied by the establishment of a new identity.

Examples:

“Jody Roberts, a reporter for the Tacoma News Tribune, disappeared in 1985, only to be found 12 years later in Sitka, Alaska, living under the name of "Jane Dee Williams". While there were some initial suspicions that she had been faking amnesia, some experts have come to believe that she genuinely experienced a protracted fugue state.”

“Hannah Upp, a teacher originally from Salem, Oregon, was given a diagnosis of dissociative fugue after she had disappeared from her New York home in August 2008 and was rescued from the New York Harbor 20 days later. News coverage at the time focused on her refusal to speak to detectives right after she was found and the fact that she was seen checking her email at Apple Stores while she was missing. This coverage has since led to criticism of the often "condemning and discrediting" attitude toward dissociative conditions. On September 3, 2013, she went into another fugue, disappearing from her new job as a teacher's assistant  at Crossway Community Montessori in Kensington, Maryland. She was found unharmed September 5, 2013, in Wheaton, Maryland. As of September 14, 2017, she was missing again; she was last seen near Sapphire Beach in her home in St. Thomas right before Hurricane Maria.”

• “Terminal Lucidity: Myth, Mystery or Miracle?”:

The authors discuss the case of Anna Katharina Ehmer, a German woman who lived from 1895 to 1922. Profoundly disabled, Ehmer spent most of her life in the Hephata asylum, near Schwalmstadt in central Germany. According to Friedrich Happich (1883–1951), a Protestant theologian who was something like the asylum's chaplain, Ehmer was…

“among the patients with the most severe mental disabilities who have ever lived in our institution. From birth on, she was seriously retarded. She had never learned to speak a single word...She gorged her food, fouled herself day and night...we have never seen that she had taken notice of her environment even for a second.”

But all that apparently changed on the day that she died, from tuberculosis. Happich was called to Ehmer's bedside by Dr Wilhelm Wittneben, the asylum doctor. What happened next stunned both men. Here's how Happich described the scene:

“When we entered the room together, we did not believe our eyes and ears. [Ehmer], who had never spoken a single word, sang dying songs to herself. Specifically, she sang over and over again "Where does the soul find its home, its peace? Peace, peace, heavenly peace!" For half an hour she sang. Her face, up to then so stultified, was transfigured and spiritualized. Then, she quietly passed away. Like myself and the nurse who had cared for her, [Dr Wittneben] had tears in his eyes.”

• The Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic:

“The laughter epidemic began on January 31, 1962, at a mission-run boarding school for girls in Kashasha. It started with three girls and spread throughout the school, affecting 95 of the 159 pupils, aged 12–18. Symptoms lasted from a few hours to 16 days. The teaching staff were unaffected and reported that students were unable to concentrate on their lessons. The school closed on March 18.

The epidemic spread to Nshamba, a village where several of the girls lived. In April and May, 217 mostly young villagers had laughing attacks. The Kashasha school reopened on May 21 and reclosed at the end of June. Earlier that month, the laughing epidemic spread to Ramashenye girls' middle school, near Bukoba, affecting 48 girls.

The Kashasha school was sued for allowing the children and their parents to transmit it to the surrounding area. Other schools, Kashasha itself, and another village were affected to some degree. The phenomenon died off 18 months after it started. The laughter reports were widely accompanied by descriptions of pain, fainting, respiratory problems, rashes, and crying. In all, 14 schools were shut down and 1000 people were affected.”

Also see The dancing plague of 1518 and Historical Facts I Consistently Forget About

8. Reminds me of the zombies from The Last of Us (never played the videogame but the HBO show is excellent, highly recommended)

9. The Harry Potter x Balenciaga crossover you didn’t know we needed.

and South Park:

10. New creature just dropped:

11. Consider the Golden Mole

12. Seeds of Science update:

Along with other SoS co-founder Dr. Dario Krpan, I recently spoke (as Roger’s Bacon) at a panel discussion at the London School of Economics, “Different Perspectives on Diversity of Thought in Social Science”. A short commentary on the event was written in the The Lancet:

Seeds of Science is a different kind of journal: “Scientific ideas, especially the truly innovative ones, are like seeds—they need fertile ground and tender care in order to grow to their true potential. Seeds of Science is a journal dedicated to nurturing promising ideas and helping them blossom into scientific innovation. Peer review is conducted through voting and commenting by our diverse network of reviewers, or ‘gardeners’ as we call them.” The point of this journal, founded by Roger's Bacon (a pseudonym) and Dario Krpan, is to provide a place where people outside the system of science can publish their findings, ideas, and views. Roger's Bacon identified two neglected aspects of diversity. First, psychological diversity. We live in environments that shape our minds. The academic environment privileges particular characteristics: diligence, competitiveness, verbal abilities, organisational skills, quantitative expertise, self-promotion. What about those who do not possess these qualities? Are they to be excluded from science? Second, functional diversity. We think of ourselves as free agents, but the settings we work in impose incentives and constraints that limit our freedom. To promote psychological and functional diversity, we must create possibilities for non-traditional scientists, amateurs, to contribute.

Our two most recent peer-reviewed articles are, in my opinion, some of the best we’ve ever published.

How to Escape From the Simulation by Roman Yampolskiy

“Many researchers have conjectured that humankind is simulated along with the rest of the physical universe – a Simulation Hypothesis. In this paper, we do not evaluate evidence for or against such a claim, but instead ask a computer science question, namely: Can we hack the simulation? More formally the question could be phrased as: Could generally intelligent agents placed in virtual environments find a way to jailbreak out of them? Given that the state-of-the-art literature on AI containment answers in the affirmative (AI is uncontainable in the long-term), we conclude that it should be possible to escape from the simulation, at least with the help of superintelligent AI. By contraposition, if escape from the simulation is not possible, containment of AI should be. Finally, the paper surveys and proposes ideas for hacking the simulation and analyzes ethical and philosophical issues of such an undertaking.”

The Muscle-Readers, a Historical Sketch by Leverage Research

The notion that subtle nonverbal cues play an important role in social interaction is relatively uncontroversial. What the upper bounds of this capacity might be, however—how much and what kind of information can be conveyed through these channels—remains unclear and, at present, under-explored. In the present work, we consider possible answers to the question and ways in which it could be addressed by considering an historical line of investigation known as muscle reading. Spurred by public interest in mentalism and the specific popularity of thought-readers, researchers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries began investigating the possibility that information about our thoughts and inclinations could be “read” from muscle tension, unconscious vocalizations, and other subtle cues. While covering some of the same ground as contemporary research on nonverbal communication, the literature of this era contains many reports that go well beyond this. Feats such as locating a hidden object, guessing the suit of a card, and determining words or names held in another’s mind were said to be achieved in controlled conditions or by academic researchers themselves. In some cases, subtle but telling movements were also said to be captured by early biometric apparatuses. While we believe that such claims should be interpreted with caution, we contend that the reports of these early researchers should not be dismissed merely because of their age and that a better understanding of this literature offers important leads for investigators today.

From the “Best of Science Blogging” feed on our Substack:

• PNAS is Not a Good Journal (and Other Hard Truths about Journal Prestige) by Moin Syed

• On Not Reading Papers by Jan Kirchner

• In Defense of Basic Science by Kian Faizi - loved this one, two great quotes shared in the essay:

I’m reminded of the apocryphal story about Michael Faraday who, when challenged by an audience member to justify the value of some discovery, retorted: “Madam, what is the use of a newborn child?”

“People cannot foresee the future well enough to predict what’s going to develop from basic research,” says George Smoot, a 2006 Nobel Laureate in Physics. “If we only did applied research, we would still be making better spears.”

13. I am nobody, nobody is who I am
    I am a traveler on this land
    And nothing, nothing, nothing is in my hands
    
    I am nobody, nobody is who I am
    I am a wanderer on these sands
    And I got down on my knees and folded my hands
    And on the great wings of a great bird
    I was carried to a temple
    Where I heard the word...

14. This short but powerful acapella song on the Ghostface Killah album Big Doe Rehab (also recommended if you’re into that sorta thing)

15. Whichipedia: guess which wikipedia article is longer. That’s it.

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The first and most famous Pfeilstorch was a white stork found in 1822 near the German village of Klütz, in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. It was carrying a 75-centimetre (30 in) spear from central Africa in its neck. The specimen was stuffed and can be seen today in the zoological collection of the University of Rostock. It is therefore referred to as the Rostocker Pfeilstorch.

This Pfeilstorch was crucial in understanding the migration of European birds. Before migration was understood, people struggled to explain the sudden annual disappearance of birds like the white stork and barn swallow. Besides migration, some theories of the time held that they turned into other kinds of birds, mice, or hibernated underwater during the winter, and such theories were even propagated by zoologists of the time. The Rostocker Pfeilstorch in particular proved that birds migrate long distances to wintering grounds.

2. Taken in Congaree National Park, South Carolina:

A cypress knee is a distinctive structure forming above the roots of a cypress tree of any of various species of the subfamily Taxodioideae, such as the bald cypress. Their function is unknown, but they are generally seen on trees growing in swamps. Some current hypotheses state that they might help to aerate the tree's roots, create a barrier to catch sediment and reduce erosion, assist in anchoring the tree in the soft and muddy soil, or any combination thereof.

3. From Crime and Punishment:

“Ghosts are, as it were, shreds and fragments of other worlds, the beginning of them. A man in health has, of course, no reason to see them, because he is above all a man of this earth and is bound for the sake of completeness and order to live only in this life. But as soon as one is ill, as soon as the normal earthly order of the organism is broken, one begins to realise the possibility of another world; and the more seriously ill one is, the closer becomes one's contact with that other world, so that as soon as the man dies he steps straight into that world. I thought of that long ago. If you believe in a future life, you could believe in that, too.”

“I don't believe in a future life,” said Raskolnikov.

Svidrigailov sat lost in thought.

“And what if there are only spiders there, or something of that sort,” he said suddenly.

“He is a madman,” thought Raskolnikov.

“We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of all that, what if it's one little room, like a bath house in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner, and that's all eternity is? I sometimes fancy it like that.”

4. Seeds of Science has launched a new feed on its Substack: "The Best of Science Blogging" (a curated selection of the best science writing from across the internet). Here are links to the articles we have featured so far; feel free to reach out if you have anything that you think we might be interested in publishing! 

• Energetic Aliens (on individuals exhibiting extraordinary cognitive stamina) by Stephen Malina 

• The Mystery of the Miracle Year (on the stunningly productive annus mirabilis of some scientists) by Dwarkesh Patel 

• The Difference Between Science and the Humanities Is Reading the Classics and Making Nature: The History of a Scientific Journal by Étienne Fortier-Dubois

• Drug Addicts and Deceptively Aligned Agents - a Comparative Analysis by Jan Hendrik Kirchner and Nadia Montazeri

• Young Blood, Old Monsters and Rejuvenated Rodents by Patrick Wilson

5. I’m always trying to learn about more “1 of 1” people; here’s one I learned about recently:

Thomas H. “Boston” Corbett (January 29, 1832 – presumed dead c. September 1, 1894) was an American Union Army soldier who shot and killed U.S. president Abraham Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Corbett was initially arrested for disobeying orders, but was later released on the orders of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who referred to Corbett as "the patriot" upon dismissing him. He was largely considered a hero by the media and the public.

Known for his devout religious beliefs and eccentric behavior, Corbett drifted around the United States before disappearing circa 1888.

As a young man, Corbett began apprenticing as a milliner (also called a "hatter"), a profession that he would hold intermittently throughout his life. As a milliner, Corbett was regularly exposed to the fumes of mercury(II) nitrate, then used in the treatment of fur to produce felt used on hats. Excessive exposure to the compound can lead to hallucinations, psychosis and twitching (known as the "hatter's shakes"). Historians have theorized that the mental issues Corbett exhibited before and after the Civil War were caused by this exposure.

After working as a milliner in Troy, Corbett returned to New York City. He later married, but his wife and child died in childbirth. Following their deaths, he moved to Boston. Corbett became despondent over the loss of his wife and began drinking heavily. He was unable to hold a job and eventually became homeless. After a night of heavy drinking, he was confronted by a street preacher whose message persuaded him to join the Methodist Episcopal Church. Corbett immediately stopped drinking and became devoutly religious. After being baptized, he subsequently changed his name to Boston, the name of the city where he was converted. In an attempt to imitate Jesus, Corbett began to wear his hair very long (he was forced to cut it upon enlisting in the Union Army).

In 1857, Corbett began working at a hat manufacturer's shop on Washington Street in downtown Boston. He was reported to be a proficient milliner, but was known to proselytize frequently and stop work to pray and sing for co-workers who used profanity in his presence. On July 16, 1858, Corbett was propositioned by two prostitutes while walking home from a church meeting. He was deeply disturbed by the encounter. Upon returning to his room at a boardinghouse, Corbett began reading chapters 18 and 19 in the Gospel of Matthew (“And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee....and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake”). In order to avoid sexual temptation and remain holy, he castrated himself with a pair of scissors. He then ate a meal and went to a prayer meeting before seeking medical treatment.

(If you're counting at home this is now the third time that I have either written about castration or mentioned it in a links post.)

6. I’m the one of the left.

7. Colin Wilson discussing Van Gogh in The Outsider:

In approaching the work of such a man as Van Gogh, an attitude of completely uncritical acceptance (such as most of us feel towards the dogmas of higher mathematics) may be more rewarding than the intellectual-critical approach. What we are most aware of in Van Gogh is that the "thought-riddled nature' has been very decisively kicked-out, and the result achieved is Lawrence's "immediacy of sense perception'. The Pro and Contra have disappeared; with the senses awakened, it becomes nonsense to talk about human misery. Certainly there is misery, but it doesn't matter. Nothing matters that any human being ever thought; only this.

8. The art of Lee Griggs:

9. Love this—from “What Can We Learn from Barnes & Noble's Surprising Turnaround?”:

By 2018 the company was in total collapse. Barnes & Noble lost $18 million that year, and fired 1,800 full time employees—in essence shifting almost all store operations to part time staff. Around that same time, the company fired its CEO due to sexual harassment claims…Could anybody fix these problems?

In the case of Barnes & Noble, the new boss was named James Daunt. And he had already turned around Waterstones, a struggling book retailing chain in Britain…

For a start, he refused to discount his books, despite intense price competition in the market. If you asked him why, he had a simple answer: “I don’t think books are overpriced.”

But the most amazing thing Daunt did at Waterstones was this: He refused to take any promotional money from publishers.

Publishers do this in order to force-feed a book on to the bestseller list, using the brute force of marketing money to drive sales. If you flog that bad boy ruthlessly enough, it might compensate for the inferiority of the book itself.

Daunt refused to play this game. He wanted to put the best books in the window. He wanted to display the most exciting books by the front door. Even more amazing, he let the people working in the stores make these decisions.

This is James Daunt’s super power: He loves books.

“Staff are now in control of their own shops,” he explained. “Hopefully they’re enjoying their work more. They’re creating something very different in each store.”

Daunt also refused to dumb-down the store offerings. The key challenge, he claimed was to “create an environment that’s intellectually satisfying—and not in a snobbish way, but in the sense of feeding your mind.”

The turnaround has delivered remarkable results. Barnes & Noble opened 16 new bookstores in 2022, and now will double that pace of openings in 2023. In a year of collapsing digital platforms, this 136-year-old purveyor of print media is enjoying boom times.

10. More Lee Griggs:

11. Nietzsche:

“Yesterday an oppressive storm hung over the sky, and I hurried to a neighbouring hill called Leutch...At the top I found a hut, where a man was killing two kids while his son watched him. The storm broke with a tremendous crash, discharging thunder and hail, and I had an indescribable sense of well-being and zest...Lightning and tempest are different worlds, free powers, without morality. Pure Will, without the confusions of intellect—how happy, how free.”

(unclear whether “kids” is referring to baby goats or human children…I’d like to imagine it was the latter.)

12. lol wut

13. William James (father of American psychology, all-around philosophical genius) describing an anonymous person’s experience in the Varieties of Religious Experiences (he would later admit that it was his own):

“Whilst in a state of philosophic pessimism, and general depression of spirits about my prospects, I went one evening into a dressing-room in the twilight…when suddenly there came upon me, without any warning, just as if it called out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. simultaneously, there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day moving nothing but his black eyes, and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other. That shape am I, I felt, potentially. Nothing I possess can defend me from that fate if the hour should strike for me as it struck for him. There was such a horror of him, and such a perception of my own merely momentary discrepancy from him, that it was as if something hitherto solid in my breast gave way, and I became a mass of quivering fear. After this, the universe was changed for me altogether. I awoke morning after morning with a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and with a sense of the insecurity of life that I never knew before.”

14. Enjoying the Paperback Paradise twitter account:

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1. The new running joke in my classes (high school biology) is to randomly insert this picture into my powerpoint slides and then swear up and down that I did not put it there and that I deleted this picture off my computer a few weeks ago. I then accuse my students of hacking into my computer and putting the picture in the slides in order to mess with me, which they vehemently deny of course. I then act really freaked out and tell them how Big Red Ball Man™ was in my dream last night and how I suspect that he is some kind of interdimensional spirit entity that is now haunting my life. I’ve done this three times so far…

2. Meet Graham—he’s what a human would look like who evolved to survive car crashes.

“Graham, the crash test man, was created as part of a new Australian road safety campaign by the Transport Accident Commission (TAC). He was designed by sculptor Patricia Piccinini, a leading trauma surgeon, and a road safety engineer, who modified him based on their knowledge of car accidents. The result isn’t a pretty sight, but it’s certainly a sobering one. As you can see, Graham doesn’t have a neck because these snap easily in car accidents. He also has a flat, fleshy face to protect his ears and nose. Also, if you’re wondering about all those extra nipples, they’re to protect his ribs like a natural set of airbags. All these modifications are needed for a human body to survive a car crash.”

3. Why is the teeth falling out dream so common in native english speaking countries like US, UK, and Australia? Very fascinated by this (zoomable picture here).

4. Sooooo it seems like China is executing prisoners by stealing their hearts (in order to use them for transplantation). Can’t say I’m surprised…

Execution by organ procurement: Breaching the dead donor rule in China

The dead donor rule is fundamental to transplant ethics. The rule states that organ procurement must not commence until the donor is both dead and formally pronounced so, and by the same token, that procurement of organs must not cause the death of the donor. In a separate area of medical practice, there has been intense controversy around the participation of physicians in the execution of capital prisoners. These two apparently disparate topics converge in a unique case: the intimate involvement of transplant surgeons in China in the execution of prisoners via the procurement of organs. We use computational text analysis to conduct a forensic review of 2838 papers drawn from a dataset of 124 770 Chinese-language transplant publications. Our algorithm searched for evidence of problematic declarations of brain death during organ procurement. We find evidence in 71 of these reports, spread nationwide, that brain death could not have properly been declared. In these cases, the removal of the heart during organ procurement must have been the proximate cause of the donor's death. Because these organ donors could only have been prisoners, our findings strongly suggest that physicians in the People's Republic of China have participated in executions by organ removal.

5.

6. Warnock's dilemma is the problem of interpreting a lack of response to a posting in a virtual community. The problem with no response is that there are five possible interpretations:

1. The post is correct, well-written information that needs no follow-up commentary. There's nothing more to say except "Yeah, what he said."

2. The post is complete and utter nonsense, and no one wants to waste the energy or bandwidth to even point this out.

3. No one read the post, for whatever reason.

4. No one understood the post, but won't ask for clarification, for whatever reason.

5. No one cares about the post, for whatever reason.

7. I’ve been listening to and enjoying the Fall of Civilizations podcast. They had a quote in the fall of the Inca empire episode that was both stunning and hilarious. Here is Titu Cusi, nephew of the the last emperor Atahualpa, recalling his father’s reaction when he first heard word of the Spaniards arrival in Peru.

When my father heard this, he was beside himself and said, "How dare those people intrude into my country without my authorisation and permission? Who are these people and what are their ways?" The messengers answered, "Lord, these people cannot but be gods, for they claim to have come by the wind. They are bearded people, very beautiful and white. They eat out of silver plates. Even their sheep, who carry them, are large and wear silver shoes. They throw thunder like the sky... Moreover, we have witnessed with our own eyes that they talk to white cloths by themselves and that they call some of us by our names without having been informed by anyone and only looking into the sheets, which they hold in front of them... Who could people of this manner and fortune be but gods?"

— Titu Cusi Yapanqui (1570), 'An Inca Account of the Conquest of Peru'

8. Your new favorite god:

Erik Hoel also writes about Bes in his essay “Now that scientists can manipulate dream content, advertisers want in”.

“If you can prompt someone during this mind-wandering hypnagogic period, in that liminal stage between wake and sleep, you can trigger specific dream content. This is called Targeted Dream Incubation (TDI). It’s surprisingly easy to do: during the early stages of sleep just have an audio message repeat to “think of [x]” wherein x is some theme (like “Santa Claus sunbathing”). This leads to early dream content about this theme, although each person will of course dream it in their own. The fact that TDI works can be confirmed by asking subjects to report on what they’re dreaming during a brief waking not too long after the prompt. This opens a possibility that one could play an audio message telling the dreamer to, say, think of having sex with a celebrity (an exercise I will leave to the reader).

TDI, by the way, is incredibly old, and was practiced across many ancient cultures. So the recent interest is really a rediscovery of well-known ancient dream technology that was used for all sorts of purposes. For example, many cultures such as the Ancient Egyptians used TDI in order to have personal meetings with their gods, like Bes (also called “Besa”), a dwarf deity with a lion head who helped women during childbirth, who protected against snakes, and was the god of things like music, art, dance, and general revelry. Here’s some instructions from ~1350 BC describing Egyptian rituals to for TDI:

". . . Make a drawing of Besa on your left hand and enveloping your hand in a strip of black cloth that has been consecrated to Isis (and) lie down to sleep without speaking a word, even in answer to a question. Wind the remainder of the cloth around your neck. . . come in this very night." (Budge, 1901, British Museum Papyrus, No. 122, lines 64 ff and 359 ff, Catalogue of Greek Papyri, vol. I, p.118).

In other words, think of them and they will come. And here’s Bes the dwarf/lion god who you were to meet.

I mean, why wouldn’t you want to dream of Bes? Looks like a pretty fun guy / hermaphroditic deity possessing (according to descriptions) “flabby man-boobs.”

9. Twitter doesn’t provide an easy way to search through your past tweets— allmytweets.net solves that problem by allowing you to view all your tweets, retweets, and liked tweets on one page.

10. Assorted tweets section:

11. Shameless self-promotion of Seeds of Science

12. Some April Fool’s Day science:

The Parking Lot Planet

We give conditions for an exoplanetary system to function as an ideal amusement park/vacation resort (with its separate parking lot, of course); in case of massive human interplanetary colonization. Our considerations stem from the fact that an amusement park needs a parking lot of roughly the same surface area, thus the best option for its construction would be a system with at least 2 planets close to each other for easy tourist transportation. We also discuss the likelihood of finding such a system out there to cut down on construction costs.

What's for Lunch? A systematic ordering of foods in the Soup-Salad-Sandwich phase space

The statistical physics of phase transitions has been hugely successful at describing numerous natural, physical, and technological phenomena, and now a rigorous examination of the phase space of the culinary regime is likewise ripe for the picking. Despite great demand for the resolution of many scientific debates over the taxonomy of food, past attempts have failed to account for complex phase behavior and co-existence, and have thus left the public hungry for a more substantial theory. By applying the principles of statistical physics and thermodynamics, we here map out the complete phase space of all culinary dishes and find three distinct phase regimes: Soup, Salad, and Sandwich. We consider the effect of different state variables on these phase boundaries, as well as regions of co-existence and triple points. With this complete 3-dimensional phase diagram of all foods, we can conclusively answer many bitter debates, including the imperishable question "is a hotdog a sandwich?" The answer: yes.