It is a good day to die. Or to be a tourist. Your choice.

It is with great pleasure that I announce to you that the world's first Klingon tourist center is opening in Stockholm on February 3.

It's called "Visit Qo'noS," which is a good thing, given that it only contains one word in Klingon.  Otherwise you'd have to feel sorry for the receptionist, who would have to answer the phone, "Good morning," and then make noises sounding like a water buffalo being examined by a proctologist.  Klingon is a true language, invented by linguists hired by the people in charge of the Star Trek franchise; it has a real syntax, phonetic and morphological structure, and so on.  So, even if it's not exactly euphonious to human ears, it deserves recognition as one of the only complete synthetic languages (a distinction it shares with J. R. R. Tolkien's Elvish, John Quijada's Ithkuil, and only a handful of others).

And now, there's a visitor center were you can go to celebrate all things Klingon.

I don't want just to learn to speak Klingon, I want to learn to stare like Gowron.  It would be very useful in my classroom.

Apparently Klingon culture is a big thing in Scandinavia.  There's the Klingonska Akademien, based in Uppsala, which teaches classes in the language, and in fact published the world's first Klingon dictionary.  I have not heard whether they sponsor such events as Bat'leth Tournaments, wherein combatants attempt to sever their opponents' valuable body parts with a double-pointed sword.  In researching that, however, I did find out that you can buy a Bat'leth on Etsy, eBay, and Amazon, and if you don't want the real thing -- and I'm using the word "real" guardedly -- you can buy a Bat'leth letter opener from ThinkGeek.

I have to say that despite my poking fun at this Extraterrestrial Extravaganza, there's a part of me that thinks it is pretty awesome, and it's not because I'm some kind of closet Trekkie (which I'm not; I'm completely out of the closet.  I love Star Trek, especially Star Trek: The Next Generation, several episodes of which I can quote virtually in toto from memory).  But even beyond that, my appreciation for this has to do with how awesome it is that the linguists hired by the original show have created a language that is complex and rich enough to spawn a tourist center and a language academy.  C'mon, don't you think that's cool?  You can even take college courses in Klingon. I'm not making this up. The University of Texas/Austin, which has one of the most prestigious Linguistics Departments of any college I know of, has a course in Klingon and other invented languages (or conlangs, as they're called, from "constructed languages").  If you're more serious about your studies, you can attend the Klingon Language Institute, in Flourtown, Pennsylvania (motto: "qo’mey poSmoH Hol," which means "language opens worlds, or else crushes them into dust if they dare to resist").  There, you can achieve fluency, which will no doubt impress your friends, coworkers, and potential lovers ("I know that sounded like I was gargling with yogurt, but it actually means 'You are extremely hot' in Klingon.").

And if you're really into it, you can attend "qep’a’ cha’maH vaghDIch," which is the 25th Annual Klingon Language Convention, being held July 19-21 in Indianapolis.

Okay, I know I'm kind of waxing rhapsodic about this, but it's a particular fascination of mine.  For some years, I have offered an independent study class at my high school in Intro to Linguistics, and the final project for this class is to create the rudiments of a synthetic language.  I assign this project, in part, because it gets students to understand how complex language actually is; I've found that they learn more about English syntax by trying to create a synthetic one than they would from any number of English grammar classes.  They are supposed to submit, as part of the project, a lexicon of at least a hundred words, and a passage from English that has been translated into their language -- my last group translated The Very Hungry Caterpillar, an accomplishment that was far harder than it sounds and of which they were, very rightly, proud.

It's always interesting to see what happens when the reins are loosed on human creativity.  We might laugh about a Klingon Tourist Center (and better to laugh about it than directly at it -- when you laugh at Klingons, they tend to rip your arm off and beat you to death with it).  But it really is pretty cool that such a thing could happen.

I realize I am opening myself up to some serious ridicule here for saying that, but I don't care.  So, to anyone who is going to give me grief about this, I say: "Hab SoSlI' Quch." ("Your mother has a smooth forehead.")

How to make yourself disappear

I've always found it intriguing how easily tricked our perceptual systems are.  Not only is this capacity for "brain failure" (as Neil deGrasse Tyson calls it) the cause of most optical illusions, it also highlights how important it is to have science as a protocol, and measuring devices to collect the data.

To once again quote the eminent Dr. Tyson, "Machines don't care what side of the bed they got up on.  They don't care if they just got in an argument with their spouse.  They don't care if they've had their morning coffee.  They'll get it right."

And yet, we still walk around with the feeling that what we're experiencing is the world as it is.  How many times have you heard people say, "I know it happened, I saw it!"?  But if you want to punch another neat hole in your confidence that your brain's view of the world is infallible, consider a piece of research just conducted by Arvid Guterstam of the Karolinska Institutet of Stockholm.

You might have heard about earlier experiments that convinced volunteers that a rubber hand was theirs, and one that extended that perception to the entire body, creating the illusion that a mannequin was actually the participant's body.  Now, Guterstam has tricked his test subjects into thinking that their body was still there -- but invisible.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

In his experiment, subjects were wearing virtual reality goggles that interfaced with a set of cameras, so that what they saw was what the camera was pointed at.  In this case, the camera was pointed at an empty space.  The experimenter and a helper then used a pair of soft brushes, and one of them stroked the volunteer's bare belly at the same time as the other, standing in the camera's field of view, stroked the air over and over in a way suggestive that there was a body there that was invisible.

If the movements of the brushes were synchronized properly, the volunteer got the distinct sensation that the camera was pointed at his/her body -- but it was completely invisible.

"We put a lot of effort into perfecting the actual brushstrokes," Guterstam said.

What is interesting is how simple the protocol was, and how convincing the illusion that resulted.  "I am very susceptible to illusions, so for me it worked," Guterstam said.  "You have a vivid sensation of having a body, but it's not directly visible.  I don't know what it would feel like to have a phantom body, but I imagine that's what it'd feel like."

The research team then performed their experiment on a group of twenty test subjects.  75% reported feeling a powerful illusion of invisibility.  "Most were surprised, and some started giggling.  It's a very unnatural, unexpected experience," Guterstam said.  "It's the first time that anyone has shown that you can embody a full invisible body."

If it's hard to believe that your brain could be so easily tricked into accepting such a bizarre view of its own body, Guterstam agrees. "The invisible body illusion is definitely pushing the boundaries of what the brain can accept as part of the bodily self," he said. "(But) it tells us that body representation in the brain is even more malleable than previously thought."

Guterstam, being a neuropsychologist, immediately thought of clinical applications of this malleability.  I, not being a neuropsychologist, immediately thought of how we could turn this into virtual reality for entertainment purposes.  If a digital camera and a pair of brushes are all that's needed to twist our perceptions of reality in such a fundamental way, how much more would it take to drop a person into a completely invented world, in which we could interact and perform in ways not limited by our actual physical capabilities?

Holodeck, here we come.

I know some of my readers are probably appalled by all this -- the idea that our mental abilities are so unreliable, so easily fooled.  Myself, I think it's kind of cool.  For one thing, I never had that much confidence in my own brain to begin with.  I've always recognized the shifting sands on which my consciousness rests, dependent as it is on my moods, focus, and level of fatigue, and even such factors as whether I've eaten lunch or had my required two cups of coffee or just caught a glimpse of an attractive and scantily-clad woman.  Now, we might be able to harness this plasticity to expand our own perception into realms that were previously inaccessible, using our capacity for "brain failures" to experience things our real perception never could.

How awesome is that?