Even if we're just dining in the dark

Last night, Carol and I participated in an event called "Dark Dining."  The sixty participants were blindfolded, and then led in groups into a dining room, seated, and served a five-course meal.  At no time were we allowed to remove our blindfolds, and in fact at the conclusion we were led out of the room in groups back to the room where we started -- never to see the place where we ate dinner (unless at some time in the future, we cheat and go back there).

The whole idea was to heighten our sensory experience by depriving us of one of our senses, the one that in fact we require the least in order to enjoy a good meal.  You might think that it would have been a messy affair, but to my knowledge there was not a single spill the whole evening.  We did look kind of silly,  however, to judge by a photograph taken by one of the wait staff:

Some of my impressions:

1)  The thing I found the most disorienting was not having any idea of the physical space I was in.  My sense of hearing is quite good and by the middle of the evening I was fairly certain that we were in a long, narrow room, but it was a very weird feeling not having any real sense of where I was, or where I was in relation to the objects and other people in the room.  I did figure out that I was at the end of the table -- I suspected it fairly quickly by the pattern of sounds, but I didn't want to reach out my hand to find out and gut punch someone.

2)  My sense of taste is really quite inaccurate.  The big shocker of the night was dessert, which took me several bites to identify as chocolate.  My first sense was that it was something a little sweet and a little bitter, but I believe that one of my neighbors said "chocolate" before I had decided that was what it was.  This makes me wonder to what extent the visual sense does contribute to your sense of taste, priming the brain for what it will be experiencing.

3)  It's almost impossible to turn off the brain's determination to create visual images.  Terry and Kornelia, our dining companions across the table, were complete strangers to us, and Carol and I both found ourselves creating strong visual impressions of them despite having exactly zero hard evidence to go on.  Need I add that neither of our mental images were even close?

4)  It's really, really difficult to eat pot roast when you can't see what you're doing.  The best technique is to spear a big piece and gnaw, caveman-style, chunks off of it.  I figured, "what the hell, no one can see me but the wait staff, and they're probably used to this sort of thing."

5)  My wife has a warped sense of humor.  At several points, we were supposed to stop talking and listen to some music, and during that time the wait staff would do things like brush a hand across our shoulders, fan us with something, or walk around clinking glasses -- all to make us more aware of our other senses.  So the next time the music played, Carol touched the back of my neck, and I thought, "ah, the wait staff is up to their tricks again."  Then she stuck her finger in my ear.  I have to admit, her aim was impeccable.  Either that, or I have big ears.

All of this put my in mind of the Ganzfeld Experiments, done in the 1930s by psychologist Wolfgang Metzger.  He had his subjects blindfolded and placed in sensory deprivation, or (in one variation) staring at a field of uniform color (the "ganzfeld," German for "complete field," of the name).  In all cases, subjects reported heightened awareness, their electroencephalogram outputs changed, and some subjects hallucinated.  (One wonders if those subjects thought a finger was being put into their ears.)  The Ganzfeld Experiments were extended in the late 1970s by Dean Radin and Daryl Bem, who reported that subjects in sensory deprivation were capable of telepathy -- a finding that has been called seriously into question by skeptics, but remains an intriguing claim of what is supposedly "the strongest quantifiable evidence of telepathy to date." 

Be that as it may, it was a fascinating evening, and one which forced me to slow down (physically and mentally) and really focus on what I was experiencing.  And the food and wine was delicious.  If you're interested in finding out more, or seeing if there's a dark dining experience near you, here's a link to the Dark Dining Project.  Give it a try -- it'll be an unforgettable evening.

Haute wackiness

I am probably identifying myself as a philistine by saying this, but I just have to ask:

Are modern haute couture clothing designers kidding?  Or what?

I was sitting at my computer this morning, reading the news, and I happened to notice a photograph (under "This Week in Photos") of a woman who appeared to be encased in a giant pot-scrubber.  I clicked on the link, and was brought here.  (Do click through the slides, although you might want to be aware that a few of them border on the Not Safe For Work, not only because some of them involve a lot of skin showing, but because you will probably laugh out loud and attract the attention of your boss.)

My overall impressions:

"Haute couture" must (contrary to my knowledge of French) mean "clothing that no one in his or her right mind would ever dream of wearing in public, for fear of being arrested for (1) indecent exposure, (2) striking an innocent bystander with a protruding garment part, (3) looking completely ridiculous, or (4) all of the above."  Several of the models in the photographs look like they went to the Princess Amidala School of Design -- encase yourself in folds of starched cloth to the point that it becomes almost impossible to walk, and layer on the makeup with a mortar trowel.  Others go for the minimalist approach; one of them is clothed in a tight fitting, brightly colored knit body-sock, but makes up for it by wearing an enormous, comical-looking sombrero.  The male models, on the other hand, look like escapees from an Alternative Lifestyles Parade in San Francisco, and favor extremely tight, Speedo-style thongs that would leave most guys singing soprano.  I also noticed that many of these models look extremely sullen.  Now that I come to think of it, if I were forced to wear clothes like that, and then appear in public and have my photograph taken, I'd look sullen, too.

Then, I wondered:  how much does this clothing cost?  So I did some research, and I found out that the average haute couture outfit costs $20,000.  That's right; it will set you back twenty grand, or more, for you to look either like an alien hooker or a Village People wannabee.  With apologies to Billy Joel; you can't dress wacky till you spend a lot of money.

I have to wonder, country-boy uncultured hillbilly that I am; is this all some kind of massive joke?  I wonder if Christian Dior and all of the other haute couture designers sit around with their design committees late at night, swigging Absolut straight from the bottle and saying, "Hey!  I know!  We could make a dress out of an old refrigerator carton!  Just cut a hole in the top for her head, and two holes in the sides for her arms!  She could wear an orange traffic cone on her head!  Let's charge $30,000 for that one!"  And then they all laugh like goons.

It may well be that I'm missing something here.  I'm as much of a connoisseur of the female form as the next red-blooded male, so it leaves me a little mystified when I look at a shapely woman strutting her stuff and my only reaction is, "Huh?"  It could be that you have to be at a certain level of sophistication, of savoir faire, to appreciate this sort of thing.

But no matter how hard I try, I can't imagine finding giant pot scrubbers and sombreros sexy.

Your lying eyes

"I'll believe it if I see it with my own eyes."

How many times have you heard someone say that?  The implication, of course, is that if you see it (or hear it), that you can't get fooled.  What your senses tell you, and how your brain interprets those inputs, are pretty reliable.

Enter Kokichi Sugihara of the Meiji Institute for Advanced Study of Mathematical Sciences, who is the master of creating illusions that do things your eyes and brain say are impossible -- and all with no trickery, no CGI, using only cardboard, glue, and other ordinary items.  Take a look at this video, in which marbles seem to roll uphill -- until he turns his little structure around and shows you that it's a trick of perspective.  (For those of you who usually aren't inclined to check out links in posts, this one and the others in this post are a must-see.)

The thing that makes me watch that clip over and over is how absolutely convincing it is, even when you know what's going on.  Something is happening in your brain when you see his little cardboard channels and platforms from one angle that makes it impossible to interpret it any other way than that the marbles are defying gravity.  "Stop it," I tell myself.  "First, you know that the Law of Gravity is strictly enforced in most jurisdictions, and second, you know how he did this!"  But my brain stubbornly refused to cooperate, preferring instead its impossible explanation of anti-gravity.

For more of Sugihara's fantastic structures, go here and here -- I find the second of these so brain-bending that it almost makes me a little seasick. 

All of this vividly illustrates a point I've made before; our sensory organs and brain are easily fooled.  Just as in my earlier post regarding visual/auditory conflict and the McGurk effect, there are times when our brains can't handle the sensory input they're being given, and amazingly, the brain's response is to admit defeat immediately and say, "Okay, then, I guess the world doesn't work the way I thought it did."  Given how easily the brain can be tricked into giving up something it's always been sure of -- gravitation, or in the case of the last video, the properties of structures lying in a plane -- is it any wonder that skeptical people disbelieve eyewitness testimony of the paranormal?

"It was a UFO!" someone says.  "I saw it!"  Or, "I saw the ghost come into the room and float across the floor and finally disappear through the wall."  Well, as Sugihara shows, I might believe that you saw something.  But whether your brain was correctly interpreting what your eyes detected is another matter entirely.  So don't get grumpy with me if I ask for hard evidence of your UFO or ghost.  It's just too simple to trick the human brain -- and scientific measuring devices are a heck of a lot less easy to fool.

The meaning of "bark bark bark bark"

An article in the Seattle Times last week tells the story of Chaser, the dog who has a vocabulary of over a thousand words.

Chaser belongs to John W. Pilley, a psychology teacher at Wofford College.  Pilley had read an article in Science about Rico, a dog who had been taught to recognize the names of two hundred different objects, and he set out to better that.  Working with Chaser four or five hours a day, Pilley showed Chaser objects, stating their names, then hiding them, then doing it again, up to forty times, with treats and other reinforcements for identifying things correctly.  He tried to add two new words a day, and also spent time reviewing ones learned earlier.

According to Pilley, Chaser "loves her drills."  She demands the four or five hours of work, gets fretful if she doesn't get it, and sometimes, Pilley says, he "has to go to bed to get away from her."

At this point, it will come as no surprise to you dog owners that Chaser is a border collie.

Border collies are not, in my opinion, dogs.  They are doglike entities created by aliens from the planet Neurotica-6, which were then put on earth to infiltrate the ranks of real dogs and learn to emulate their ways.  This effort has been only partially successful.  I say this because I own a border collie, Doolin, who is the single oddest animal I've ever owned, and she's had some stiff competition in that regard.  Doolin learned how to unlatch our fence gates by watching us do it.  She has no concept of the word "play;" when she chases a frisbee and brings it back, you can tell that what she's thinking is, "Didn't I do a good job retrieving this frisbee?  I did notice, however, that I was 5.8 milliseconds shy of my previous record time.  Next time, I will beat my old record!  You'll see!"  Thus the joke:

Q:  How many border collies does it take to change a light bulb?
A:  Only one!  And then he will rewire the electrical system to bring it up to code!

Contrast this to my other dog, Grendel, who is a mutt to the extent that he looks like the result of someone putting random body parts from about seven different dog breeds together with superglue.  All Grendel thinks about is playing, food, and sleeping.  To say that he and Doolin don't understand each other is a vast understatement.  Mostly when they interact, they seem to regard each other with mild puzzlement.  Grendel seems to be thinking, "It looks like a dog, and smells like a dog.  But it never wants to play.  Oh, well, I do!  Where's my rope toy?"  Doolin, on the other hand, thinks, "Dear lord, that's a funny-looking sheep.  No matter, I can still herd it.  There's a job to be done here, and I'm the one to do it!"

In any case, back to Chaser.  After teaching Chaser over a thousand nouns, Pilley went on to teaching her some verbs -- touch, paw, fetch, nose, and so on.  And even more amazingly, Chaser understands categories; each of her frisbees (for example) has its own name, and she knows them all, but given the command "fetch a frisbee" she will pick out one of them.  Now, Pilley is working on trying to teach Chaser syntax -- the idea that changing the order of the words can change the meaning of the command; that "touch the red frisbee, then fetch the green ball" means something different than "fetch the green frisbee, then touch the red ball."

I find this absolutely fascinating.  I wonder if what is going on in Chaser's brain is the same as what happens when children learn words -- i.e. if there are analogous language-learning center in dogs' brains and in humans'.  I wonder, too, what the limit of her understanding is -- if she could be taught to understand consequentials, for example -- "if I touch the red toy, you touch the blue one; if I touch the blue toy,  you touch the green one."  (I know some students who still haven't mastered simple consequentials such as, "If you don't turn in your homework, you will get a bad grade.")  Lastly, I wonder if this is a skill unique to border collies, or if other dog breeds, or other animal species, might have the same skill.  I doubt seriously whether Grendel's vocabulary, for example, could ever be extended past "rope toy," "dinner time," and "youwannagoforawalk?"  And our cats are hopeless -- not that I don't think they have adequate brainpower, but because any time I try to train them to do something, they respond with scorn.  "Stay off the dinner table?" they seem to say, their expressions dripping sarcasm.  "Maybe for the moment.  But you have to stop watching me at some point, you know."

But keep your eye on Chaser.  She's going places.  I'm sure she'll be making the rounds of the talk shows, and after that, the next logical step is the political arena.  Wouldn't you like to see Sarah Palin and Chaser debate the merits of Universal Veterinary Health Care?  I know I would.

Six degrees of cousinhood

Allegedly we're connected to anyone in the world through six degrees of separation.  That contention usually uses the criteria of "knowing someone" as the connector.  What, however, about being actually blood-related to the people we bump into?

I've had three instances of finding I'm related to someone that, by all odds, I shouldn't have any particular connection to.  The most recent, and to my mind most amazing, example of this I discovered only recently.  I was on the way to a gig in Rochester with my band Crooked Sixpence, and Kathy, the fiddler, was carpooling with me and our friend Pamela who calls many of the dances we play for.

We were just chatting idly when the subject of family came up.  Kathy, who was born and raised in southeastern England, was telling us that while she seems thoroughly British, actually one side of her family were French Jews who came over to England from Alsace in the late 1800s.

"That's interesting," I said.  "My family is mostly Cajun French, and they were Catholics who came over to Nova Scotia from France in the 17th century; but one branch of my family were part of a small Jewish group in Donaldsonville, Louisiana -- and my forebears on that side of the family came over from Alsace in the 1800s, too.  What was your Jewish ancestor's last name?"

"It's a pretty odd name," Kathy said.  "Godchaux."

Well, my jaw dropped; my great uncle, Lehmann Meyer, married a Godchaux.  This spurred Pamela to announce at the dance that Kathy and I were cousins, which got a good laugh because we look nothing alike, and there it rested.

Well, a couple of days ago, I decided to do a little digging, and found that someone had posted online records of a Godchaux family that had gone from Alsace to England.  I sent the link to Kathy, and she responded, "Je suis GOBSMACKED!  C'est ma famille!"  In fact, the records included the names of her grandmother and grandfather!  Intrigued, I started to examine the information on the link I'd sent more carefully.

Kathy's family, and mine, not only emigrated from the same area of France at the same time, the names of her ancestors and the folks they married share not one, or two, but eight family names.  On the Meyer branch of my family there are (by blood and by marriage) the names Bloch, Godchaux, Levy, Solomon, Kahn, Weill, and Dreyfus.  Amongst Kathy's Godchauxs are... Meyer, Bloch, Levy, Solomon, Kahn, Weill, and Dreyfus.

I still haven't found our common ancestor, but if we're not cousins, I'll be astonished.

What's the likelihood?  A French guy from Louisiana and an Englishwoman from near London, and we're probably cousins within six generations or so.  And, as I said, this isn't the first time this has happened to me; a former student, who was born and bred here in upstate New York, turned out to be a third cousin, once removed; and a woman who sat near us at Cornell hockey games for years, a third cousin.  In each case, we discovered the link through casual conversation that turned up the connection.

I know we're all related -- it's become almost a cliché.  But what has left me, like Kathy, gobsmacked is that we may be more closely related to some of our friends and casual acquaintances than we would have dreamed.  I wonder, if it were possible... if we're connected to everyone in the world by six degrees of separation, what is the average degree of cousinhood we share with those around us?  Unfortunately, it's probably not possible to figure that out, given the paucity of genealogical records prior to 1800, but as my experiences show, it may well be a smaller number than any of us would have guessed.

Send in the clones

A group of scientists at Kyoto University are currently working on resurrecting the woolly mammoth.

The method is simple in principle; they will use tissue from a frozen mammoth carcass found in Siberia.  Nuclei will be removed from cells in the tissue, and those nuclei will be inserted into the egg cells of an elephant which have had their own nuclei removed.  The engineered egg cells will be inserted into the uterus of a female elephant, and if all goes well, the elephant will give birth to a baby mammoth.

Of course, in practice, it's quite a bit more difficult than that.  Differentiated tissue (i.e. just about all the tissues in an adult organism) has undergone genetic changes that have to be undone, returning the cells to totipotence -- the state of then being able to re-differentiate into all the kinds of tissue the animal produces.  Put simply, if this isn't done, skin cells can only produce more skin cells, muscle cells more muscle cells, and so on.  The trick is to return the cell to the capacity it had very early in development.

It's been done before, not that it's easy; consider Dolly the Sheep, the first animal born that was the result of adult-tissue cloning.  Some animals have proven very difficult to clone -- to my knowledge, monkeys have never been cloned from adult tissue, although my source for that particular piece of information is two years old, and in this field things change nearly on a daily basis.  And the idea of using cloning to produce animals that are endangered (or extinct) has already been done; a gaur, an endangered species of water buffalo, was produced that way in 2001, but the baby only lived two days.

And this brings us to the risks.

First, there's the risk of it being a big waste of money, and I hope my readers know me well enough by now that I'm not saying this from any sort of anti-science stance.  The gaur that only lived two days died of dysentery, but some scientists believe that it was felled by the cloning process itself.  Recall that Dolly the Sheep lived only half the lifespan of a normal sheep.  Cells seem to retain a "memory" of the age of the animal they were taken from, and so if someone cloned me (heaven forfend), the baby thus produced would be normal in all respects except for two -- first, it would look like me, which is unfortunate but not fatal; and second, its cells would very likely retain the genetic memory of having been taken from a fifty-year-old, and therefore the cloned Gordon would probably die of old age by age thirty or so.  So one has to wonder if a mammoth born from this process would live long enough to make it worth it.

Second, of course, there are the vaguer fears of resurrecting extinct animals, which of course have only been made worse by Jurassic Park.  Many folks seem to be reacting to the mammoth-cloning project by saying, "Don't you people ever watch science fiction movies?  Inevitably, the scientists plunge right on ahead with their experiments, ignoring the people who are worried about the risks, and then next thing you know there are herds of giant, malevolent mammoths destroying Tokyo."

Well, maybe.  I think the former problem -- that it will be unsuccessful, and therefore something of a waste of time, effort, and money -- is far more likely.  Nevertheless, I think it should proceed.  There's just the coolness factor of getting to see, finally, what an animal looks like that went extinct long ago.  Myself, I'd love to see them bring back a few others -- how about the dodo?  Or the moa?  (For those of you who don't know what a moa is, picture a badass ostrich on steroids, and you have the idea.)  The Tasmanian wolf would also be near the top of my list, as would the saber-toothed tiger, although I suspect that last one went extinct long enough ago that it might be impossible to find intact cell nuclei.  All animals with high awesomeness factor, however.

I recognize the fact that even if the cloning project is successful, it is a long way from producing a single individual that way to producing a large enough number of them to generate a self-sustaining population, that is capable of reproducing faster than their death rate -- what ecologists call the "minimum viable population."  The question comes up, of course, of where we would put a herd of mammoths once we got one -- heaven knows I don't want them around here, we have enough trouble with deer eating our gardens.  But that's a question to be resolved later.

In any case, we'll keep our eye on the team at Kyoto University, which is predicting success within five years.  Whatever happens, they are sure to learn a great deal about the cloning process from this study.  All Jurassic Park-style fears aside, it's a pretty amazing thing to attempt, and I wish them success in this mammoth undertaking.

Swamp thing redux

A friend of mine, knowing both my Louisiana origins and my passion for all things cryptozoological, sent me the following clip of a news broadcast alleging that some hunters caught a photograph of a zombie-like creature that had trashed their hunting camp in Berwick, Louisiana.  A security camera at the camp caught the image right before the camera was destroyed.  (See it here.)

Well, first I must comment upon the totally, like, you know, amazing articulateness of the, like, newscasters, both of whom like made me totally wonder how anyone would, like, you know, hire them to do the news.  Secondly, the word "Photoshop" screamed itself across my brain as soon as I saw the photograph.

Among the many problems with this photo, the most important one was that the creature's eyes were glowing.  This only happens when you take a photograph with a flash at night -- the glow is the reflection of the flash from the tapetum lucidum, a reflective membrane at the back of the retina of certain animals.  Security cameras, not having flashes, wouldn't create this effect.  So unless you believe that a zombie's eyes glow from the Fire of Their Inner Evil, this one seems to be a non-starter.

Watching this clip of course started me on a veritable orgy of monster-watching, and even if predictably I thought none of them convincing, I found a few that were worthy of honorable mention. My favorite one, in the chills department, is this one, which supposedly captures images of a "shadow creature" taken by some hikers who were using a videocamera.  The videocamera was later found, Blair-Witch-style, and "no one has ever come to claim it."  It's definitely creepy -- not to be watched at night.  However, once again to point out only the main problem with it, it is supposed to come from "Emerson County" in which mysterious disappearances had occurred in 1957, and this camera was found only two miles from where those disappearances had taken place.  Unfortunately for the creators of this video, there is no Emerson County in any state in the United States -- surprising, I know, but I just checked the official Index of Counties, and it goes from Emanuel County, Georgia to Emery County, Utah with nary an Emerson to be found.  So, First Rule of Creepy Video Creation is:  If you expect your viewers to believe that your video is real, don't state that it was taken in a place that does not, in fact, exist.

Here's another, with a bit of a frame from "The Paranormal Report." Besides the obvious problem with Clayton Morris' statement that the reporter who sent it in had no reason to fake it because he didn't want his name mentioned, there's another, and subtler problem with it, that makes me certain it's faked.  Watch it and see if you can figure it out.

Ready for the answer?

The creature's shadow is pointing the wrong direction.  Look at the shadow on the man's face; it's clear that the sun is coming from the right side of the frame (from the viewer's perspective), i.e. from behind the cameraman's right shoulder.  The creature's shadow should therefore be pointing up and to the left (again, from the viewer's perspective).  It points up and to the right.  Unless "interdimensional creatures" block sunlight in a different fashion than we ordinary, plain-old-dimensional creatures, it's a fake.

This next one has all of the classic elements; hikers in a remote area, videotaping just for the hell of it, and accidentally capturing a clip of a bigfoot.  "Did you see that... in the clearing!" is also required dialogue to insert somewhere in there.  Even the site is well-chosen; Mt. St. Helens is supposedly the epicenter of Pacific Northwest bigfoot sightings.  (There's a lava tube on the side of the mountain called "Ape Cave," which some claim is because of the prevalence of sasquatches in the area -- but the real explanation is more prosaic.  It was named after a hiking group called the "St. Helens Apes" in the 1950s.)  I don't have any particular reason to claim that this one's a hoax, except that I tend to instinctively doubt clips like this because of the obvious likelihood of fakery; but to my eyes, it does look a little more like a guy in a monkey suit than it does like my personal conception of bigfoot.

Lastly, I have to give some credit to the makers of this video.  Myself, I didn't know that bigfoot wears Nike tennis shoes, but I guess even cryptozooids have to cave in to fashion trends in athletic wear.  And the tag line "The people in the car and the cameraman were never heard from again" is pure brilliance.