Fuckin' Awesome

Yes. That's all I have to say about these photographs (posted on Morbid Anatomy):
They come from a newly-released book, Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine 1880–1930. I think I need it.

Now cracks a noble mind

As I was stumbling into bed a minute ago, far too late for the alarm clock I just set, I began mumbling in exhausted delirium. "Goodnight, sweet prince," I slurred to... myself, I suppose, "and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. The rest," I continued, "is silence." I was immediately struck by three things, none of which (fortunately) were corporeal:

1) That I had just recited the lines out of order, and would probably be consigned to an extra decade in purgatory for my offense against the Bard.

2) That it's funny how both Hamlet and Horatio use the word "rest" two different ways in their abutting lines-- could it have been wordplay?

3) And lastly: what if it was a stage direction? I mean, it's one of the most famous lines in Shakespeare, if not the English canon, but what if "the rest is silence" is not what the actor playing Hamlet is actually supposed to say, but it just means that he's supposed to shut the hell up after prophesying the election lighting on Fortinbras? If certain scholars are to be believed, our written corpus of Shakespeare's work came from the frantic scribblings of audience-based scribes, probably looking to sell pirated copies of the latest blockbuster. So what if Jack Half-Flagon was scratching out the final iambs and forgot to put parentheses around the part where Hamlet starts mumbling incoherently before shuffling off his mortal coil? Over the next couple centuries, that smidge of non-dialogue gets enshrined as one of Will Shakespeare's most profound sentiments. It could all be a lie! I can see, even now, the topless towers of Academe crumbling to dust around my feet, and prophesy the destruction lights on English Departments. So tell them, with the occurrents, more and less, which have solicited. The rest is silence.

Riding the Wave

I used to be very troubled by the fact that my mind is basically just a very complicated chemical reaction. Thought, emotion, aspiration, and dream could all be reduced (or maybe oxidized) to basic organic molecules and cation gradients. Don't get me wrong, it still isn't my favorite thing to contemplate, but I put it in a new perspective this morning. As biology is increasingly melded with chemistry, and chemistry with physics, we begin to see the ways by which fundamental principles govern complex systems. For instance, traits may be determined by DNA, which is structured the way it is due to the interactions of nucleic acids, which interact as they do because of the properties of nitrogenous bases and phosphates, which react in specific ways because of the electrons in their molecular orbitals. Electrons, of course, and all subatomic particles really, are essentially wave functions describing the probabilities of their existence at a point in space and time. Despite the gross over-simplification and my minuscule knowledge of quantum physics , it makes me think about the fact that we are not just animals (as per Darwin's decentralization of humanity), we are not just unconscious minds (as per Freud's), we are not just chemical reactions sloshing around in a bony brain-case, we are not even collections of atoms. We are, as far as I can tell, probability functions with enough pieces to have a high degree of existence. The "Free Will" of particles notwithstanding, thinking about these kinds of things can lead to a very dark, scary, and confusing place, not unlike certain Baltimore neighborhoods late at night. In the interest of not getting mugged and beaten by my own psyche, I don't spend too much time there. But visiting every once in a while does remind me that living in a place where I can think of myself as a well-maintained chemical reaction really isn't so generative of existential angst. After all, it could be a lot worse: I could have to reconcile my rich inner life and sense of self with the notion that I am just a lucky interference pattern of quarks. Here, I have no choice but to take Hume's sacrament:

"I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours’ amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther. Here then I find myself absolutely and necessarily determined to live, and talk, and act like other people in the common affairs of life..."

(A Treatise of Human Nature, I.vii)

Drinking the Scotsman's claret absolves me of my grindings and rumblings, and all is well enough for now.

A brief glimpse into the Postbacc Life

The second most exciting thing I did yesterday was open a new bottle of deli mustard. I have not finished my last bottle, but I was having a hot dog and wanted Hebrew National deli mustard. This begs a question: what was the most exciting thing that I did yesterday? I ate a poptart dipped in sugar-free pudding for desert.

As I took a moment to look down upon the pitiful creature I have become, my giddy laughter was tinctured with self-loathing and despair. Unable to decide whether to burst into tears or collapse in gales of manic laughter, I could only return to the anesthetizing tedium of organic chemistry. The test is on Friday. I am not yet ready.

Indiana Jones and the Lost Crusade

Let it not be forgotten that today marks the 805th anniversary of the Fourth Crusade sacking Constantinople. Yes, that's right, the capital of the Byzantine Empire-- a Christian (albeit Eastern Orthodox) empire and stalwart buttress against the rising Ottoman tide. None of that mattered on April 12, 1204, though, and the resulting slaughter was the ultra-violent capstone on the most hilarious crusade ever. To make a long comedy short, the Warriors of Christ make it to Venice without enough money, so the cunning (and blind) Doge Dandolo cons them into paying for boats by assaulting the rebellious port-town of Zara. Hearing of this development, Pope Innocent III sent a pretty stern letter to the leaders of the crusade, reminding them that killing other Christians wasn't really in the spirit of the venture, and threatening excommunication if they pulled another stunt like it.

Things might have gone smoothly at this point were it not for the appearance of Alexius Angelus. A claimant to the throne of Byzantium, Alexius (IV, or so he hoped) offered the flat-broke Knights of the Cross a humongous pile of money if they helped him reclaim his throne from Alexius III. So, they did.

The siege began around July 17, 1203, and lasted until April of the following year, during which period many wacky developments occurred, including the crusaders instating Alexius as emperor, then attacking a mosque defended by Greeks and Turks alike, and the Venetians mistakenly burning down a huge part of the city. Oops.

It all really went to hell (well, more to hell) when one of Alexius IV's courtiers, Alexius "Murtzuphlos"* Ducas had the new emperor strangled to death and proclaimed himself Alexius V.** This made the crusaders angry. And you won't like them when they're angry... Despite the Pope's warning not to do anything stupid, the Holy Warriors (for lack of a better term) totally got medieval on Byzantium's ass.

I think Papa Innocent summed it up best in this letter:

"As for those who were supposed to be seeking the ends of Jesus Christ, not their own ends, who made their swords, which they were supposed to use against the pagans, drip with Christian blood,­ they have spared neither religion, nor age, nor sex. They have committed incest, adultery, and fornication before the eyes of men. They have exposed both matrons and virgins, even those dedicated to God, to the sordid lusts of boys.*** Not satisfied with breaking open the imperial treasury and plundering the goods of princes and lesser men, they also laid their hands on the treasures of the churches and, what is more serious, on their very possessions. They have even ripped silver plates from the altars and have hacked them to pieces among themselves. They violated the holy places and have carried off crosses and relics."

Anyway, suffice it to say they all got excommunicated, the end.**** So the Crusade never got within spitting distance of the Holy Land, Constantinople got absolutely mashed, and the schism between the Eastern and Western Churches was pretty much solidified. So did anyone really win?

Yep. The Venetians did. Heaps and heaps of filthy Byzantine lucre poured into Venice-- most famously, the giant horses on the Basilica di San Marco. They stand as pigeon shit-covered monuments to the Lost Crusade, and to the eternal idiocy of "holy" war.





Footnotes
*A reference to his prominent eyebrows which, depending on the source you read, were either "bushy," "luxuriant," or "conjoined and overhanging."
**No, being named Alexius was not a requirement for the empry. Sure seems like it though.
***Ah, the sordid lusts of boys. To what ends will they not drive us? This is crucially different from the sordid lust for boys, which would be a thorn in the Church's side in a different century.
****Sort of. The ones who stayed to defend Constantinople got absolved and had their pilgrimage vows annulled, which elicited a huge "WTF?" from Innocent (see the above-linked letter).

An Easter Homily

I am currently sitting in the library and, until about 60 seconds ago, I was taking a practice MCAT. All was quiet, and only a handful of other doughty souls were studying here on a beautiful Sunday morning. Enter two campus security personnel. The crackle of their walkie-talkies and casual conversation are reminders of the fact that Goucher's library has designated Quiet Zones, and I am not in one. I cram down my noise-canceling headphones and try to tune out the interlopers: hydrolytic cleavage and mitosis demanded my undivided attention.

Still, the officers were chatting only twenty feet away, so I couldn't help but notice when the conversation shifted from someone needing to open a locked room in the student center to biblical exegesis. "Over the years, you see," one guard explained, "the text has changed. Like, i's and t's. Sometimes, you know, a t gets crossed that wasn't before, so the word is different. Which is why you need to go back to the original text to get the true meaning. Most people," he continued, "just follow the text... without thinking about it." "Blindly?" his companion suggested. "Exactly. Blindly. But you need to really understand the original meaning."

I took off my headphones. I wanted to hear clearly when he started quoting Luther or Trithemius. But he had apparently run out of sermon in that direction, so he swerved, taking a new tack: "You got to have faith. When you look at the structure... of a tree, or when you look at the complicated structure of a cell, you know it couldn't have evolved. There had to be a creator, and that creator had to be infinite." (I'm paraphrasing here, because his actual words are rapidly melting from my memory, but I think that was the gist of it.) His companion made a soft noise of assent, or perhaps feigned interest, and thanked him.

The itinerant blue-light preacher bid him adieu and ambled out of my silent-once-more sanctum; his flock of one walked off in the other direction, into the stacks. I got back to my MCAT: "The concentration of the protein cyclin rises and falls during the cell cycle as shown in Figure 1. What mechanism could account for this oscillation of cyclin protein concentration?" 'Divine intervention' was not one of the answer choices.

You can't make a theory without breaking a few eggs...

And just in time for Easter, too:



And the creamy fondant center of this Cadbury Genius Egg is the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. *Crunch* *Schlurp* Mmmmm! The Origin... of Delicious!