"Spem in alium" in memory of Terry Pratchett

YouTube link.

"In June 2011 Terry Pratchett presented a one-off BBC television documentary entitled Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die on the subject of assisted death. It won the Best Documentary award at the Scottish BAFTAs in November 2011. He also stated several times that, when he dies, he wished to hear Thomas Tallis's Spem in alium played in the background."

Reddit memorial megathread.

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Review of an anti-vaccination book for children

Salon explains:

In 2012, a proactive Australian anti-vaxxer named Stephanie Messenger self-published a children’s book called “Melanie’s Marvelous Measles.” With the book, Messenger endeavored to “educate children on the benefits of having measles and how you can heal from them naturally and successfully.”

Amazon offers a disclaimer that the book is “provided by the publisher/author of this title and presents the subjective opinions of the publisher/author, which may not be substantiated.”

Comments on the book are more incisive.  This one by is my favorite:

“Don’t overlook the lesser known Dr. Seuss books in this series – ‘Horton hears an air raid siren’, ‘Oh the places you’ll itch’, ‘How the Grinch caught Chlamydia’, ‘And to Think That I Contracted It on Mulberry Street’, ‘Skull Fracture Mayzie’, ‘Hop on your remaining foot’, ‘The 500 days in ICU of Bartholomew Cubbins’, and ‘If I Ran the Mortuary.’” 

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Lord of the Rings mythology, continued

YouTube link.

This is a sequel to the video I posted last month.

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Mythology of The Lord of the Rings

YouTube link.

A less-than-five-minute summary of the mythology for the TL;DR crowd.

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The downnside of terraforming

Consider this scenario:

A large number of humans have been prenatally genetically modified to live and work in a nonterrestrial location (they require subzero temperatures for comfort, need a different atmospheric gaseous composition, etc).  Then the planet they were destined to live on is vaporized by a supernova; there is no equivalent alternate planet in the known universe.

Now they need another location, so all of them are transported to a partially-suitable planet which will then be terraformed to their requirements.  This will require thousands of years, during which they will enter cryo-sleep, waking in groups at intervals for habitat maintenance until the external world is suitably modified.

So far, so good.  But now suppose that after the terraforming machines have been going for a few centuries a cohort of colonists awakens to discover that their new planet, thought on preliminary survey to contain only primitive plants and beasts, is actually host to what appears to be a sentient creature.  And that sentient race is obviously being forced to adapt to climate change at a rate exponentially faster than normal planetary evolution. 

Are the humans ethically justified in continuing to terraform the new planet to their own needs if the process entails the genocide of the aboriginal inhabitants?

The story is The Keys to December, an 8,700-word (you can read it in an hour) novelette by Roger Zelazny, an acclaimed science-fiction author (Hugo Award x6, Nebula x3).  I first encountered this story a decade ago in the compilation The Doors of his Face, the Lamps of his Mouth (Simon and Schuster, 2001). 

A brief review is here, along with the names of several other books that include it that might be available from your library if Doors of his Face is not.  If you insist on reading it online, the fulltext is here (in a somewhat awkward font).

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"Book Week, 1930"

Is there still an official "book week?"

Via Vintage Blog.

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"The Monkey's Paw"

It's too late for this Halloween, but a classic supernatural horror story by W. W. Jacobs can be enjoyed any time. 

"It had a spell put on it by an old Fakir," said the Sargeant-Major, "a very holy man. He wanted to show that fate ruled people's lives, and that those who interfered with it did so to their sorrow. He put a spell on it so that three separate men could each have three wishes from it."

His manners were so impressive that his hearers were conscious that their light laughter had jarred somewhat.

"Well, why don't you have three, sir?" said Herbert White cleverly.

The soldier regarded him the way that middle age is wont to regard presumptuous youth."I have," he said quietly, and his blotchy face whitened.

"And did you really have the three wishes granted?" asked Mrs. White.

"I did," said the seargent-major, and his glass tapped against his strong teeth.

"And has anybody else wished?" persisted the old lady.

"The first man had his three wishes. Yes, " was the reply, "I don't know what the first two were, but the third was for death. That's how I got the paw." 

Fulltext here, via The Dish.

p.s. - there is a compendium of illustrated short stories by the author at the name link.

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The "Pillar portrait" of the Bronte sisters

"Anne is on the left with Emily in the centre and Charlotte on the right. Originally, their brother, Branwell, had begun painting himself in the picture but ultimately decided to paint himself out by replacing his image with a 'pillar'. This must have been done before the painting was completed as recent x-rays, which clearly show his image, indicate that it is incomplete. Badly mixed oil paints can have a tendency to become translucent with age, and as a result of Branwell's inexperience in this area, his own ghostly image can now be seen 'in the pillar'. 

The original is on display in the National Portrait Gallery, London

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Some old books had feet

Erik Kwakkel explains:

When medieval binders knew that the object they were processing would be placed on a lectern, for example in a chained library, they often added tiny feet like the ones seen here. They made sure that the lower edge of the binding and the bottom part of the pages would not be damaged by the rough wood of the lectern - notice the shiny bottom of the feet.

More photos at the link, and more details here of a chained library

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What was in Edgar Allan Poe's head?

Many years ago I spent a lot of time studying the life and works of Edgar Allan Poe (see this manuscript), but do not remember previously having read this account of his exhumation:

When Poe died, he was buried, rather unceremoniously, in an unmarked grave in a Baltimore graveyard. Twenty-six years later, a statue was erected, honoring Poe, near the graveyard’s entrance. Poe’s coffin was dug up, and his remains exhumed, in order to be moved to the new place of honor. But more than two decades of buried decay had not been kind to Poe’s coffin—or the corpse within it—and the apparatus fell apart as workers tried to move it from one part of the graveyard to another. Little remained of Poe’s body, but one worker did remark on a strange feature of Poe’s skull: a mass rolling around inside. Newspapers of the day claimed that the clump was Poe’s brain, shriveled yet intact after almost three decades in the ground.

We know, today, that the mass could not be Poe’s brain, which is one of the first parts of the body to rot after death. But Matthew Pearl, an American author who wrote a novel about Poe’s death, was nonetheless intrigued by this clump. He contacted a forensic pathologist, who told him that while the clump couldn’t be a brain, it could be a brain tumor, which can calcify after death into hard masses.

I don't believe a brain tumor or any other body tissue would calcify after death (unless there were some unusual mineralogical conditions in the soil), but some neoplasms such as meningiomas and various metastases do calcify during life.  Interesting.

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Found at a yard sale ($2.00)

Not found by me, unfortunately (although this is one reason I like to browse auctions).  It's a nice copy even without that scribbling inside the cover.

Posted at Reddit.

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"Lordly indifference of Nature"

An excerpt from "The Golden Fly," a short story by Algernon Blackwood about a man with situational depression who finds solace in a natural setting:

He was a business man, honest, selfish, and ambitious; and the collapse of his worldly position was paramount to the collapse of the universe itself - his universe, at any rate. This "crumbling of the universe" was the thought he took out with him. He left the house by the path that led into solitude, and reached the heathery expanse that formed one of the breathing-places of the New Forest. There he flung himself down wearily in the shadow of a little pine-copse. And his crumbled universe lay down with him, for he could not escape it.

Taking the pistol from the hip-pocket where it hurt him, he lay upon his back and watched the clouds. Half stunned, half dazed, he stared into the sky. The perfumed wind played softly on his eyes; he smelt the heather- honey; golden flies hung motionless in the air, like coloured pins fastening the sunshine against the blue curtain of the summer, while dragon-flies, like darting shuttles, wove across its pattern their threads of gleaming bronze. He heard the petulant crying of the peewits, and watched their tumbling flight. Below him tinkled a rivulet, its brown water rippling between banks of peaty earth. Everywhere was singing, peace, and careless unconcern.

And this lordly indifference of Nature calmed and soothed him. Neither human pain nor the injustice of man could shift the key of the water, alter the peewits' cry a single tone, nor influence one fraction of an inch those cloudy frigates of vapour that sailed the sky. The earth bulged sunwards as she had bulged for centuries. The power of her steady gait, superbly calm, breathed everywhere with grandeur undismayed, unhasting, and supremely confident.... And, like the flash of those golden flies, there leaped suddenly upon him this vivid thought: that his world of agony lay neatly buttoned up within the tiny space of his own brain. Outside himself it had no existence at all.

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James Joyce's poor health

"One summer evening in 1917, James Joyce was walking down a street in Zurich when he developed a pain in his right eye so severe he couldn’t move. A bystander helped him to a nearby bench, where he gazed at halos around the streetlights. After twenty minutes, he was able to pull himself onto a tram and make his way home. Joyce was suffering from glaucoma brought on by acute anterior uveitis, an inflammation of the iris, which had eroded his optic nerves. He’d had two previous “eye attacks,” as he called them—the first in 1907—and now allowed a surgeon to cut away a small piece of his iris. Nora Barnacle, Joyce’s partner, wrote to Ezra Pound that Joyce’s eye was still bleeding painfully ten days on. Joyce’s attacks recurred intermittently for the next twenty years, and in that time he had about a dozen eye surgeries. By the age of forty-eight, he was essentially blind. The origin of Joyce’s decades-long battle with uveitis has never been definitively named. Before penicillin’s introduction, in the 1940s, the most common cause was syphilis (uveitis is now most often associated with autoimmune disorders), and Joyce began visiting prostitutes at age fourteen. Was his affliction sexually transmitted?"

An answer is offered in Harper's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Syphilitic.  I find the new information about his use of galyl (phospharsenamide) to be convincing.

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