The first recorded syphilis epidemic flared up in war-torn Naples in 1494, only two years after Columbus discovered the New World. From there syphilis spread throughout Europe. Ever since then, controversy has raged about the origin of syphilis.

A popular belief is that Columbus’s crew got infected in the New World and brought the spirochete back to Europe, where they transmitted the disease to others while serving as mercenaries during the first Italian War. The competing pre-Columbian hypothesis asserts that syphilis was always present in the Old World yet wasn’t recognized until 1494.

{ Spirochetes Unwound | Continue reading }

{ L’Inconnue de la Seine (French for the unknown woman of the Seine) was an unidentified young woman whose death mask became a popular fixture on the walls of artists’ homes after 1900. Her body was pulled out of the Seine River in Paris around the late 1880s. A pathologist at the Paris morgue was so taken by her beauty that he had a molder make a plaster cast death mask of her face. The mask was used for the head of the first aid mannequin Rescue Annie, created by Peter Safar and Asmund Laerdal in 1958 and used in numerous CPR courses. Her face has been called by some “the most kissed face” of all time. | Wikipedia | Continue reading }

One day in 1945, a man named Percy Spencer was touring one of the laboratories he managed at Raytheon in Waltham, Massachusetts, a supplier of radar technology to the Allied forces. He was standing by a magnetron, a vacuum tube which generates microwaves, to boost the sensitivity of radar, when he felt a strange sensation. Checking his pocket, he found his candy bar had melted. Surprised and intrigued, he sent for a bag of popcorn, and held it up to the magnetron. The popcorn popped. Within a year, Raytheon made a patent application for a microwave oven.

The history of scientific discovery is peppered with breakthroughs that came about by accident. The most momentous was Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin in 1928, prompted when he noticed how a mould that floated into his Petri dish killed off the surrounding bacteria. Spencer and Fleming didn’t just get lucky. Spencer had the nous and the knowledge to turn his observation into innovation; only an expert on bacteria would have been ready to see the significance of Fleming’s stray spore. As Louis Pasteur wrote, “In the field of observation, chance favours only the prepared mind.”

The word that best describes this subtle blend of chance and agency is “serendipity.” (…)

Today’s internet plies us with “relevant” information and screens out the rest. Two different people will receive subtly different results from Google, adjusted for what Google knows about their interests. Newspaper websites are starting to make stories more prominent to you if your friends have liked them on Facebook. We spend our online lives inside what the writer Eli Pariser calls “the filter bubble.”

{ More Intelligent Life | Continue reading }

photo { Luigi Ghirri }

Few people go down in history by their childhood nicknames, which is probably for the best. But such was the destiny of Gaius Caesar Germanicus, the emperor of Rome from 37 to 41 A.D. and the son of a much-loved commander of the Roman forces stationed in Germany. The father dressed young Gaius up in a kid-sized legionnaire’s uniform, to the delight of the troops, who dubbed him Caligula, meaning “Little Boots.”

The moniker stuck, although the last thing anyone remembers about Caligula is the cuteness. A couple of on-screen depictions of his reign are indicative. It was presented as the height of decadence in Caligula (1979), the big-budget, pornographic bio-pic produced and directed by Bob Guccione Jr., with Malcolm McDowell as the emperor, featuring numerous Penthouse Pets-of-the-Month, smouldering in lieu of dialogue. (Also, Helen Mirren, minus toga.) I have promised the editors not to embed any video clips from it in this column. Suffice it to say that the film was terrible, and Gore Vidal, who wrote the script, seems to have disowned it just as soon as the check cleared.

Better by far — indeed, unforgettable — was John Hurt’s turn as the mad tyrant in “I, Claudius,” the BBC miniseries from 1976. He portrayed Caligula as terrifying and monstrous, yet also strangely pitiful. Power corrupts, and absolute power sounds even more enjoyable. But having every whim met without hesitation does not make the descent into insanity any less agonizing, even for Caligula himself. By the time the emperor is assassinated (at the age of 29, after not quite four years in power), Hurt makes his death seem almost a mercy killing. (…)

But what if all of these claims about Caligula were wrong, or at least overblown? What if he was, in fact, completely sane — his awful reputation the product of a smear campaign?

{ Inside Higher Education | Continue reading }

artwork { Sit, Noir 33 | Hybrid Thinking, curated by Wooster Collective | Jonathan Levine Gallery, NYC, until February 11, 2012 }

{ Chris Cunningham, Rubber Johnny, 2005 }

Laurie Anderson: And I thought, I must meet this guy [Andy Kaufman], and I went up to him and said, “I love what you’re doing,” and I became his sidekick. I followed him around for a couple of years and did his straight-man stuff in his clubs. You know, he wrote an incredible book that was never published.

The Believer: Really?

Laurie Anderson: Yeah—it should have been published. He came over here and read it to me on a lot of nights. I don’t know what happened to this book. But in terms of expectation, he was the beyond-master of anyone that I’ve ever come across. He was a genius of disrupted expectation. For example, we’d go out to Coney Island to just practice situations, and we’d get on the roto-whirl where the bottom drops out, and we’d just be spinning around, so there’s a minute where everyone’s locked in. And that’s when he began to freak out: “I think we’re all going to die on this ride! Look at the way the belts are done, they’re really flimsy!” And everyone is like, “Who is this moron?” and second, “Maybe the belts aren’t attached that well,” and it was chaos. Or we’d go over to the test-your-strength thing, and my job was to help him make fun of the guys who were doing it. [Doing Andy’s voice] “Ah, look at this weakling”—and everyone got so angry at that for a while. They’d go, “OK, you try it, wise guy,” and so he would—and I’m supposed to, like, nag him. [Doing a whiney voice] “Get me a bunny, Annndy. I want a big bunny. Look at these guys, you’re a lot stronger than they are!” And, anyway, so he would try, and it would hardly register on the scale at all, it wouldn’t even get up to “Try Again, Weakling,” it just went beep [flatline noise], and at that point he would demand to see the manager: “I don’t know why this happened!” And everyone is like, “Oh god,” and he goes way beyond what’s supposed to happen.

{ Interview with Laurie Anderson | Continue reading }

Coca-Cola was named back in 1885 for its two “medicinal” ingredients: extract of coca leaves and kola nuts. Just how much cocaine was originally in the formulation is hard to determine, but the drink undeniably contained some cocaine in its early days. (…)

Back in 1885 it was far from uncommon to use cocaine in patent medicines (which is what Coca-Cola was originally marketed as) and other medical potions. When it first became general knowledge that cocaine could be harmful, the backroom chemists who comprised Coca-Cola at the time (long before it became the huge company we now know) did everything they could with the technology they had available at the time to remove every trace of cocaine from the beverage.

{ Snopes | Continue reading }

artwork { Robert Rauschenberg, Coca Cola Plan, 1958 }

One of the most notable examples of an assemblage of highly mutilated human remains from the Southwest being attributed to witchcraft execution rather than cannibalism, is Ram Mesa, southwest of Chaco Canyon near Gallup, New Mexico. This site was excavated by the University of New Mexico as a salvage project, and the relevant assemblage was reported by Marsha Ogilvie and Charles Hilton in 2000.

The Ram Mesa assemblage, consisting of 13 individuals, is pretty similar to many other assemblages in the Southwest attributed to cannibalism, but Ogilvie and Hilton make a plausible case that while the remains are clearly highly “processed” there isn’t a whole lot tying this dismemberment and mutilation to actual consumption of the remains. Few of the bones showed any evidence of burning, a condition which applies to several other cases of alleged cannibalism as well. The few cut marks, which were mostly found on children’s skulls and lower jaws, weren’t particularly indicative of the removal of large muscles that might be expected if consumption were the object.

{ Gambler’s House | Continue reading }

photo { Zhe Chen }

“Lord” Timothy Dexter (1748 – 1806) was an eccentric American businessman noted for a series of lucky transactions and his writing. (…)

He made his fortune by investing in Continental Dollars during the Revolutionary War, when they could be purchased for a tiny percentage of their face value. After the war was over, and the U.S. government made good on the dollars, he became wealthy. (…)

His 1802 memoir A Pickle for the Knowing Ones, or Plain Truths in a Homespun Dress is entirely misspelled and contains no punctuation. At first he handed his book out for free, but it became popular and was re-printed in eight editions. In the second edition Dexter added an extra page which consisted of 13 lines of punctuation marks. Dexter instructed readers to “peper and solt it as they plese.”

Dexter announced his death and urged people to prepare for his burial. About 3,000 people attended his mock wake. The crowd was disappointed when they heard a still-living Dexter screaming at his wife that she was not grieving enough.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading | Literary historian Paul Collins discusses Lord Timothy’s lasting appeal | NPR | Life of Lord Timothy Dexter }

Cannibal Holocaust is a 1980 Italian horror film directed by Ruggero Deodato.

The film tells the story of a missing documentary film crew who had gone to the Amazon to film indigenous tribes. A rescue mission, led by the New York University anthropologist Harold Monroe, recovers their lost cans of film, which an American television station wishes to broadcast. Upon viewing the reels, Monroe is appalled by the team’s actions, and after learning their fate, he objects to the station’s intent to air the documentary. Much of Cannibal Holocaust is the portrayal of the recovered film’s content, which functions similarly to a flashback and grows increasingly disturbing as the film progresses.

Cannibal Holocaust achieved notoriety because its graphic violence aroused a great deal of controversy. After its premiere in Italy, it was seized by a local magistrate, and Deodato was arrested on obscenity charges. He was charged with making a snuff film due to rumors that claimed some actors were killed on camera. Although Deodato was later cleared, the film was banned in Italy, the UK, Australia, and several other countries due to its graphic depiction of violence, sexual assault, and the actual slaughter of seven animals.

After seeing the film, director Sergio Leone wrote a letter to Deodato, which stated, [translated] “Dear Ruggero, what a movie! The second part is a masterpiece of cinematographic realism, but everything seems so real that I think you will get in trouble with all the world.” […]

The courts believed that the actors who portrayed the missing film crew and the native actress featured in the impalement scene were killed for the camera. Compounding matters was the fact that the supposedly deceased actors had signed contracts with the production which ensured that they would not appear in any type of media, motion pictures, or commercials for one year following the film’s release. This was done in order to promote the idea that Cannibal Holocaust was truly the recovered footage of missing documentarians.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Francesca Ciardi was one of four actors whom the Italian police believed had been murdered in the making of the 1980 horror film Cannibal Holocaust. So realistic was the film that shortly after it was released its director Ruggero Deodato was arrested for murder. The actors had signed contracts to stay out of the media for a year in order to fuel rumours that the film was a snuff movie. The court was only convinced that they were alive when the contracts were cancelled and the actors appeared on a television show as proof.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

In every pirate movie there’s always at least one crew member who wears an eye patch, usually due to some hideous disfigurement. (…)

Actually, it looks like the only reason pirates wore eye patches was to keep one eye adjusted to darkness while boarding another ship. That’s right: If this theory is correct, they only wore the patch before and during a raid. (…)

It takes the human eye several minutes to adjust to darkness — however, this way, pirates could simply swap the eye patch and immediately be prepared to fight in the lower decks without constantly running into walls, which is something you’d probably want to avoid if you’re carrying a cutlass.

{ Cracked | Continue reading }

Is it true Thanksgiving was invented by the editor of Harper’s Bazaar?

Right idea, wrong magazine. Thanksgiving as we know it today — at least on the scale we know it — is largely the creation of Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, one of the first women’s magazines. Mrs. Hale spent 36 years browbeating public officials high and low before finally getting Thanksgiving declared a national holiday in 1863.

{ The Straight Dope | Continue reading }

{ The Amazing History and the Strange Invention of the Bendy Straw | Centuries before Darwin, Leonardo guessed through his study of rocks and fossils that the world is far older than Genesis claims }

Always ‘God bless’ a sneeze. In most English-speaking countries, it is polite to respond to another person’s sneeze by saying “God bless you.” Though incantations of good luck have accompanied sneezes across disparate cultures for thousands of years (all largely tied to the belief that sneezes expelled evil spirits), our particular custom began in the sixth century A.D. by explicit order of Pope Gregory the Great. A terrible pestilence was spreading through Italy at the time. The first symptom was severe, chronic sneezing, and this was often quickly followed by death. Pope Gregory urged the healthy to pray for the sick.

It’s bad luck to walk under a leaning ladder. This superstition really does originate 5,000 years ago in ancient Egypt. A ladder leaning against a wall forms a triangle, and Egyptians regarded this shape as sacred (as exhibited, for example, by their pyramids). To them, triangles represented the trinity of the gods, and to pass through a triangle was to desecrate them. (…)

Knock on wood to prevent disappointment. Though historians say this may be one of the most prevalent superstitious customs in the United States, its origin is very much in doubt. “Some attribute it to the ancient religious rite of touching a crucifix when taking an oath,” Goldsmith wrote. Alternatively, “among the ignorant peasants of Europe it may have had its beginning in the habit of knocking loudly to keep out evil spirits.”

{ Origins of 9 Common Superstitions | Continue reading }

photo { Loublanc }

In a world where nearly half the population is male—the sex with higher levels of testosterone and its potential for causing aggressive behavior—the female majority, by better translating emotions into words, must have mitigated countless dangerous conflicts. We should not underestimate the role that may have been played by this verbally skilled, moderating majority in the evolution of language itself.

Of all the calls, hoots, and screeches issued by our chimpanzee relatives, the only ones that sound a little like human speech are the coos exchanged in quiet moods by mothers with their young; the first language may have been “motherese.”

{ The NY Review of Books | Continue reading }

photo { Billy Kidd }

Dmitri Mendeleev (1834 – 1907) was a Russian chemist and inventor. He is credited as being the creator of the first version of the periodic table of elements. Using the table, he predicted the properties of elements yet to be discovered.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

photos { 1. Daniel Everett | 2. Lars Tunbjörk, Stockbroker Tokyo, 1999 }

What’s the deal with witches and broomsticks? (…)

Harner notes that since antiquity many hallucinogenic plants have been known throughout the world, including some species of the potato family such as jimsonweed, devil’s-weed, mad apple, etc., as well as potato cousins like mandrake, henbane, and belladonna.

Trolling through the works of medieval and Renaissance writers, Harner finds a number of instances in which witchy hallucinations follow a potent hit of drugs. How were these drugs administered? Typically in the form of an ointment. Where was this ointment applied? To the skin, of course, but more effectively to the mucous membranes. Where can one find mucous membranes? In the vagina, among other places. How would one apply ointment to one’s vagina? Well, one can always count on one’s fingers, I suppose. But you could also use, uh, a pole. And where might one find a pole in the average peasant household? A broomstick.

Harner buttresses his thesis with some choice quotes. From a witchcraft investigation in 1324: “In rifleing the closet of the ladie, they found a Pipe of oyntment, wherewith she greased a staffe, upon the which she ambled and galloped through thick and thin.” Also this from around 1470: “But the vulgar believe, and the witches confess, that on certain days or nights they anoint a staff and ride on it to the appointed place or anoint themselves under the arms and in other hairy places.”

{ The Straight Dope | Continue reading }

The Book of Revelation is the strangest book in the Bible. It’s the most controversial. It doesn’t have any stories, moral teaching. It only has visions, dreams and nightmares. Not many people say they understand it, but for 2000 years, this book has been wildly popular. (…)

I started with three questions. First, who wrote this book? And what was he thinking? Second, what other books of Revelation were written about the same time? How did this book, and only this one, get into the Bible? And what constitutes the appeal, whether you’re talking psychologically, literarily, politically, of this book? (…)

The author says he’s a prophet named John. He claims to be a prophet called John of Patmos, because he said he wrote from the island of Patmos, which is about 50 miles off the coast of Turkey, in what was then Asia Minor. John said he was in the spirit, that is, he was in an ecstatic trance, when suddenly he heard a loud voice talking to him. He turned around and saw a divine being speaking to him, telling him what must happen soon. (…)

Next, John says, he was back in heaven, and suddenly he saw seven angels, each of seven angels carrying an enormous golden bowl. And each bowl is full of the wrath of God. And as angels sound the trumpets, the first angel starts to pour the wrath of God over the earth and catastrophes happen. (…)

Finally, John pictures Babylon as the prophet Isaiah had seen Babylon. You may not recognize her, but she is a whore. She’s sitting on a seven-headed red beast, and drinking from a golden cup, the blood of the saints. (…)

You may be wondering, who was John, and why did he write this? The evidence suggests that John was a Jewish prophet. He was living in exile around the year 90 of the first century. We can’t understand this book until we understand that it was written in war time, or shortly after war. John was a refugee, apparently, from the Jewish war that had destroyed his home country, Judea, started, as you may know, in year 66 when Jews rebelled against the Roman Empire. The slogan of the war was, “In the name of God and our common liberty.” And four years later, in the year 70, 60,000 Roman troops stormed into Jerusalem and killed thousands of people. They said that the blood was as high as the horses’ bridles in the city of Jerusalem. That’s what Josephus wrote in his account of the war. And starved and raped, and killed thousands of people, and then finally attacked and burned down the great Temple of God which formed the entire city center.

{ Elaine Pagels/Edge | Continue reading }

Bento de Spinoza was born on November 24, 1632, to a promi­ nent merchant family among Amsterdam’s Portuguese Jews. This Sephardic community was founded by former New Christians, or conversos—Jews who had been forced to convert to Catholicism in Spain and Portugal in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centu­ ries—and their descendants. After fleeing harassment by the Iberian Inquisitions, which doubted the sincerity of the conversions, many New Christians eventually settled in Amsterdam and a few other northern cities by the early seventeenth century. With its generally tolerant environment and greater concern for economic prosperity than religious uniformity, the newly independent Dutch Republic (and especially Holland, its largest province) offered these refugees an opportunity to return to the religion of their ancestors and re­ establish themselves in Jewish life. There were always conservative sectors of Dutch society clamoring for the expulsion of the “Por­tuguese merchants” in their midst.8 But the more liberal regents of Amsterdam, not to mention the more enlightened elements in Dutch society at large, were unwilling to make the same mistake that Spain had made a century earlier and drive out an economi­ cally important part of its population, one whose productivity and mercantile network would make a substantial contribution to the flourishing of the Dutch Golden Age.

The Spinoza family was not among the wealthiest of the city’s Sephardim, whose wealth was in turn dwarfed by the fortunes of the wealthiest Dutch. They were, however, comfortably well-off. Spinoza’s father, Miguel, was an importer of dried fruit and nuts, mainly from Spanish and Portuguese colonies. (…)

mainly from Spanish and Portuguese colonies. To judge both by his accounts and by the respect he earned from his peers, he seems for a time to have been a fairly successful businessman. (…)

Spinoza may have excelled in school, but, contrary to the story long told, he did not study to be a rabbi. In fact, he never made it into the upper levels of the educational program, which involved advanced work in Talmud. In 1649, his older brother Isaac, who had been helping his father run the family business, died, and Spinoza had to cease his formal studies to take his place. When Miguel died in 1654, Spinoza found himself, along with his other brother, Gabriel, a full-time merchant, running the firm Bento y Gabriel de Spinoza. He seems not to have been a very shrewd merchant, however, and the company, burdened by the debts left behind by his father, floundered under their direction. Spinoza did not have much of a taste for the life of commerce anyway. Financial success, which led to status and respect within the Portuguese Jewish community, held very little attraction for him. (…)

By the early to mid-1650s, Spinoza had decided that his future lay in philosophy, the search for knowledge and true happiness, not in the importing of dried fruit.

Around the time of his disenchantment with the mercantile life, Spinoza began studies in Latin and the classics. (…) Although distracted from business affairs by his studies and undoubtedly experiencing a serious weakening of his Jewish faith as he delved ever more deeply into the world of pagan and gentile letters, Spinoza kept up appearances and continued to be a mem­ ber in good standing of the Talmud Torah congregation through­ out the early 1650s. He paid his dues and communal taxes, and even made the contributions to the charitable funds that were ex­ pected of congregants.

And then, on July 27, 1656, the following proclamation was read in Hebrew before the ark of the Torah in the crowded syna­gogue on the Houtgracht: “The gentlemen of the ma’amad [the congregation’s lay governing board] hereby proclaim that they have long known of the evil opin­ ions and acts of Baruch de Spinoza. (…) Spinoza should be excommunicated and expelled from the people of Israel. By decree of the angels and by the command of the holy men, we excommunicate, expel, curse, and damn Baruch de Espinoza. (…) No one is to com­municate with him, orally or in writing, or show him any favor, or stay with him under the same roof, or come within four cubits of his vicinity, or read any treatise composed or written by him.”

We do not know for certain why Spinoza was punished with such extreme prejudice. That the punishment came from his own community—from the congregation that had nurtured and edu­ cated him, and that held his family in high esteem—only adds to the enigma. Neither the herem itself nor any document from the period tells us exactly what his “evil opinions and acts” were sup­ posed to have been, or what “abominable heresies” or “monstrous deeds” he is alleged to have practiced and taught. He had not yet published anything, or even composed any treatise. Spinoza never refers to this period of his life in his extant letters and thus does not offer his correspondents (or us) any clues as to why he was expelled.

{ Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age, Chapter 1 | Continue reading }

painting { Baruch Spinoza by Samuel van Hoogstraten, 1670 }

It’s weird to think that tens of thousands of years ago, humans were mating with different species—but they were. That’s what DNA analyses tell us. When the Neanderthal genome was sequenced in 2010, it showed that as much as 1 to 4 percent of the DNA of non-Africans might have been inherited from Neanderthals.

Scientists also announced last year that our ancestors had mated with another extinct species, and this week, more evidence is showing how widespread that interbreeding was.

We know little about this extinct species. In fact, we don’t even have a scientific name for it; for now, the group is simply known as the Denisovans.

{ Smithsonian Magazine | Continue reading }