Plants Are Apparently Evil

George Ellison of The Smoky Mountain News writes:
 
Let’s give the last [and first...] word to Horace Kephart, who describes “laurel hells” to a T under the heading Thickets in the second volume of Camping and Woodcraft (1906): “A canebrake is bad enough, but it is not so bad as those great tracts of rhododendron which ... cover mile after mile of steep mountainside where few men have ever been. The natives call such wastes ‘laurel slicks,’ ‘woolly heads,’ ‘lettuce beds,’ ‘yaller patches,’ and ‘hells.’ The rhododendron is worse than laurel, because it is more stunted and grows more densely, so that it is quite impossible to make a way through it without cutting, foot by foot; and the wood is very tough. Two powerful mountaineers starting from the Tennessee side to cross the Smokies were misdirected and proceeded up the slope of Devil’s Court House, just east of Thunderhead. They were two days in making the ascent, a matter of three or four miles, notwithstanding that they could see out all the time and pursued the shortest possible course. I asked one of them how they had managed to crawl through the thicket. “We couldn’t crawl,” he replied, “we swum,” meaning they had sprawled and floundered over the top. These men were not lost at all. In a ‘bad laurel’ (heavily timbered), not far from this, an old hunter and trapper who was born and bred in these mountains, was lost for three days, although the maze was not more than a mile square. His account of it gave it the name that it bears today, ‘Huggins’s hell.’

Who would have thought that laurels and rhododendrons could be so sinister?

Statuesque

Below are some of my favorite three-dimensional portraits.  I'm hardly an expert at art, much less sculpture, but these ones for some reason strike me.  I believe there's quite a variety - from the whimsically precocious to the raunchily morbid - but I don't think I'll add any further comments at the moment.  I'm not even sure that I could explain these guys in any lucid way.  Just scroll down and enjoy.  And if you ever have the chance, definitely go see them in person...it adds a whole other dimension.

Bust of a Child, Possibly Henry (Guido Mazzoni)

Bust of Veiled Woman (Antonio Corradini)

La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans (Edgar Degas)

Victor Noir (Jules Dalou)

Winged Victory of Samothrace (Unknown)

Beau Brummell (Irena Sedlecka)

Your Daily Craft

Victorians just had so much fun, didn't they?

CRAFT TIME!

@ Niagara

...just got back, actually.  Scary stuff, water. 

But, as you can see, we are working hard to keep our Brit entertained.

Beep Boop

I'm not in town. Have a photo of Sidney Crosby winning the Olympics.

Bibliotheca Alexandrina

I mentioned Alexandria in the ancient world several weeks ago when discussing the seven wonders.  I meant to say then that I am surprised the Library of Alexandria doesn't make that list.  And if you think libraries are boring then you clearly need to go check out the Bodleian in Oxford or the Trinity College Library in Dublin...or even the National Archives in DC.

Anywho.  The Royal Library of Alexandria is, for me, up there with the Titanic in my random-destructive-things-in-history-that-just-make-me-want-to-scream list.  This was apparently one of the largest centers for learning and information in the ancient world (although no one now knows how large it was, exactly, or how many original works it contained).  Also, no one knows when or how it was destroyed (that's how completely crap the people were who destroyed it were).  Julius Caesar may have done it when he set fire to the city of Alexandria, which would make me side with Brute...or perhaps the library burned in the third century AD by the hand of the Roman Emperor Aurelian or else by the Christian Patriarch Theophilus.  Possibly this scholars' refuge lasted into the Dark Ages but was destroyed in the 600s by an invading Arab army.

Either way...grrrr.  Think of all of the things that were lost!  Gah!  I don't know what else to say.

More Comics

The only thing that saves the comic strip Garfield from being worse than the comic strip The Family Circus is the redeeming qualities of the self-explanatory Garfield minus Garfield.  Click to reveal Jon Arbuckle's existential angst.

Hooray!

To help me stay even more OCD...

Organization!  I love it!

Vuvuwha?

Trendy newspaper vocab word of the week (at least, a happier choice than all of those terms that mean "suffocating in tar balls"...meh).

Wikipedia tells me that a synonym is lepatata, but I think for now I'll stick with vuvuzela.  As to what it is, just turn on a World Cup match and listen for the sound of bees (you won't have to strain too hard).  Wikipedia also tells me that these plastic horns produce a monotonous B flat.

They may be traditional for South Africans, but they aren't actually that old - vuvuzelas first appear in soccer stadiums in the 1970s (in Mexico, strangely), but weren't mass-produced in their plastic glory in South African factories until 2001.  Still, any anthropologist worth her salt will tell you tradition doesn't have to be ancient.  And now you know.

June 21st

It's the first day of summer...first day of Wimbledon...I wasn't going to put a video up, but...

Learn Something!

An intriguing introduction to your brain.  If you've got an hour or so.  And...inquire within, I've got essays to match!

Idiom Du Jour

Today's selection: "mad as a hatter"

Conjures up images of Alice and Wonderland, no?  But this one doesn't actually stem from the opium-laced mind of Lewis Carrol (although that may well be what's kept it alive).  Everyone knows this phrase refers to an extremely crazy person - certifiably insane, even - and this is how that came about.

It comes, not surprisingly, from the world of millinery.  Not straw boaters or lace caps though...we're talking felted beaver hats.  For a fascinating detailed history of this process (no, really!), click here - but essentially it all boils down to glue.  In order to get the individual beaver hairs to stick together and form a felt, they had to be treated with a mercury solution, which is all well and good until the hats are later steamed and molded...this process releases mercury fumes that, over prolonged exposure, attack the nervous system with very nasty results.

Interesting - as a culture, we've already lost the association between insanity and felted hat-making...I wonder how this idiom will hold up (in America at least) when the word "mad" stops referring to crazy and only means angry?

A Grim Topic

Bess refuses to have this discussion with me, so I'm going to have it with myself.

A while back, I saw this article about how incredibly comfortable a certain European prison was (was it Iceland? Finland? Denmark? Something like that, I believe), and more recently I've been watching a Dickens story (BBCized) about the Marshalsea prison in London, and what this all amounts to is me revisiting a topic I last debated with a group of lawyers a little more than a year ago...what is the point of prison?

The first reason I can think of (perhaps being an American...) is punishment.  An individual has made some transgression and - like something straight out of Dante - must suffer accordingly. 

Counter to this concept of retribution is that of reform.  Here, prison allows those who have committed crimes to reflect and repent, emerging from the process as an improved citizen.

Prison might also generally be thought of as a motive for not committing a crime.  This can work in one of two ways: what's known as individual deterrence, in which people who have already experienced imprisonment are less likely to step out of line upon release; there's also the thought that the threat of prison might discourage the general populace from breaking laws, which is known as general deterrence.

Lastly, prison serves to isolate criminals from non-criminals  In this way, the public is protected from anyone from a small minority who might be dangerous.

I suppose all of these are (equally? or not?) valid in a system where criminals are always caught and no innocent people are ever put behind bars. But what about in our world? I guess I'll leave it to you to ponder.

Rien

I've got nothing for you today...

I'm proud to say that I've actually not been on my computer at all for the last 24 hours. A feat!

RoboCrouch

I know, another YouTube video...

This one though is in honor of the British kid who's arriving today, and in anticipation of all the calcio we'll doubtless be watching.  Yes...he's here for a month.



Okay I'm swearing off videos for a bit...something serious soon.

I Concur...

A Personal History

I cleaned out the guest bedroom yesterday and happened upon some photos of my mysterious ancestors and relations...I enjoy old photographs, and thought you might, too.

The least mysterious of the bunch (although still quite mysterious): Mom and Dad - and both of their dads - not quite 30 years ago.  Not sure why the sunglasses.  (Or the toupee.)

Mom's dad as a youngster, high-jumping oldschool.  For real.

I thiiink this is my Dad's dad again?  But I'm not quite sure...

I love this picture.  Specifically my great-grandfather Klehn's part of the picture.  Also pictured are my Grandma K and her children Lois, Hazel, and John.  Mom's mom hasn't been born yet.

Who is this?  I knoweth not.  But she looks cool.  I like her hat.

Strangely, there were no photos from my Dad's mom's side...they would have been the ones, I thought, to have taken the most pictures.  Perhaps my grandma Boots still has all of them archived away in her house.

Anyway, I wish I could provide some more information about who these people were and when these pictures were taken...but for now, enjoy them for what they are.  After all, a picture is supposed to be worth a thousand words?

???

“Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind.”
     Marston Bates

...and so, quite possibly, is looking for a research job.  Suppose I've just got to keep on keeping on! Summer is becoming a bit boring - it will be good to nail down something interesting to do for the next year or two.

Coloriffic

For all your coloring needs...

A comprehensive list of colors

A dye-mixing program

How The Robin Got His Red

There's been a bit of a feeding frenzy outside my window this week...

This guy's got a ways to go though - seems like he's more orange than red.

Obscure 80s Weekly

That time of week again...

Thursday, never say Canada hasn't got it: Martha and the Muffins - Echo Beach

Quite simply an excellent song for Friday: The Church - Under the Milky Way

Saturday has an uncomfortable alliance between 70s and 80s...but try to get through to at least the 2:00 mark of: M - Pop Musik

For Sunday, something somewhat less obscure: Madness - Our House

For Monday, something somewhat more obscure: The Nits - In the Dutch Mountains

More classiness from the people who brought you Don't You Want Me on Tuesday: The Human League - Louise

And Wednesday, behold the hair: Kajagoogoo - Too Shy

Fabric Hair Bouquets

Direct from Paris...how pretty are these?

The Sauciest

Cooking...It's a science, it's an art, it's a skill and a talent necessary for life.  Or at least, it's necessary for the lifestyle and continued happiness of a foodie like me.  And if you're a foodie like me, you'll understand that it's sauce that makes the culinary world go around.  I know I'm not alone in my thinking - in fact, back in the 18whenevers, some French guy classified all of the known sauces into four categories, known as the Grandes Sauces, or mother sauces (hey, I never claimed that cooking was a history).  These days, the list has grown just a bit...however, if you're a chef worth your salt, you ought to know how to execute these; believe me, with minor modifications, they'll get you a long way.  And if you botch the technique, you'll end up with a mess on your hands that no amount of fancy ingredients will be able to fix.  So enough of that 'hunger is the best sauce' nonsense...without further ado, I give you...

The Mother Sauces

• Bechamel: this white sauce, arguably the king of the great sauces, with a little sleight of hand, can be eaten in anything from lasagna to moussaka to All-American macaroni and cheese.  The traditional ingredients include milk, onion, salt, and other spices such as nutmeg, bay, or clove, but the backbone of this first sauce is the roux.  A roux is just a fancy term that refers to a mixture of equal parts butter and flour.  Depending on the length of time the roux is cooked, the color and flavor range in intensity from white to blond to brown.  Now, the trick to a bechamel is simply: patience.  Careful whisking,  slow and moderated addition of ingredients, and low heat if necessary are what make the difference between burnt, greasy, gloopy sludge and creamy deliciousness.
• Velloute: the word velloute essentially means 'velvety', and to accomplish this simple sauce a white or blond roux that, instead of milk, contains chicken or fish stock.  In the essential recipe, no spices are called for, but the wide variety of secondary sauces can be created by adding wine, mushrooms, shallots, or the reduced glazes from meat, among other things.
• Allemande: this sauce, while separated out by the original sauce-namer, is something of a modified velloute.  It is distinguished, however, by a liason, an egg yolk-and-cream mixture which further thickens and increases richness of the aforementioned velloute.  Lemon juice is also often added to round off this sauce.  Now that we can accomplish a lump-free roux, the trick to the allemande is adding the emulsifying egg mixture back into a hot broth without scrambling.  This is done by what's known as tempering: a very small amount of hot veloute is added to the liason mixture and worked in so that the temperatures of the two liquids can be reconciled.  This is repeated until about a third of the veloute is added before the sauce is mixed together.
  
• Espagnole: a multitude of hearty recipes can be derived from this stock-based mother sauce; certainly don't let the name fool you into thinking this is reserved for Spanish dishes.  Here, another roux lies at the heart of the matter...only this time, a brown roux is in order.  What this means is that the butter-flour mixture is left on the heat for a more extended period so a brown color and nutty flavor are created.  Keep in mind: low heat and constant maintenance are your friends!  Once this has come together, broth or stock is added.  Traditionally this means veal, but chicken is a modern substitution; more meat, marrow, vegetables (particularly tomato), and seasoning can be added to finish this espagnole sauce.

While the classic categorization is a landmark one, there are, of course, sauces that don't quite fit into the above categories.  And so, it's only fair to briefly touch on three other (no less fussy) sauces I couldn't live without.

Honorable Mentions:

• Tomato: now I may be wrong, but this may perhaps be the most prevalent and flexible sauce of the modern world.  Tomato sauces, as is obvious, start out with tomatoes - roasted, dried, crushed, pureed, as paste, or fresh off the vine - and are thickened with anything from a reduction to a puree to, classically, a creamy roux.  They can be flavored with garlic, salt, spices, wine, or meat.  They can be served over pasta, fish, meat, vegetables, or bread.  Indeed, the list goes on...it's easy to see why I can't end this entry without making a note of the old 'pomme d'amour'. 
• Hollandaise: this one shines brightest atop eggs benedict, but I know for a fact that my mother enjoys it over steak, and from it are derived all kinds of emulsions, including the ever-useful but often-overlooked mayonnaise.  Along with roux and liason, the emulsion is a tricky beast to tame along the way to saucier status (a saucier, by the way, is a master sauce-maker).  Besides, particularly in the case of mayo, there's something about eating raw eggs that just gives people an uneasy feeling.  However, salmonella is quite unusual these days, and can be ousted from this uncooked sauce with the addition of a low-pH environment - helpfully provided by the vinegar or lemon juice added to these recipes and their derivatives.  And if you're still feeling uneasy, look for pasteurized, in-shell eggs at the grocery.  Now, back to emulsions.  To make a basic hollandaise, a fat-soluble liquid - butter - is added to a water-soluble liquid - lemon juice - so that the two miraculously do not separate.  For hollandaise, this is accomplished with egg yolks and vigorous whisking over a double boiler (to prevent scrambled eggs).  The trick is to first beat the egg into one or the other liquids and then to slowly - slowly! - drizzle in the other ingredient, incorporating it as you pour.  If, despite your best efforts, separation does occur, don't despair: simply grab another egg yolk and whisk in small portions of your now-oily mess until your emulsion has re-formed.
• Vinaigrette: after all of the finickiness of French sauce-making, it seems that perhaps adding vinaigrette to the list is a bit of an insult.  However, a simple blend of oil and vinegar (typically in a 2-or-3:1 ratio) can be used not only for dousing on salads and drizzling over bread, but also for marinating vegetables and meats and also for adding a last-minute dose of flavor to almost any food, cooked or uncooked. 

A Poem From My Childhood

(This might explain a good deal about why I am the way I am...)

When awful darkness and silence reign
Over the great Gromboolian plain,
   Through the long, long wintry nights;-
When the angry breakers roar
As they beat on the rocky shore;-
   When Storm-clouds brood on the towering heights
Of the Hills of the Chankly Bore:-

Then, through the vast and gloomy dark,
There moves what seems a fiery spark,
   A lonely spark with silvery rays
   Piercing the coal-black night, -
   A Meteor strange and bright:-
Hither and thither the vision strays,
   A single lurid light.

Slowly it wanders, - pauses, - creeps, -
Anon it sparkles, - flashes and leaps;
And ever as onward it gleaming goes
A light on the Bong-tree stems it throws.
And those who watch at that midnight hour
From Hall or Terrace, or lofty Tower,
Cry, as the wild light passes along, -
     "The Dong! - the Dong!
   "The wandering Dong through the forest goes!
     "The Dong! - the Dong!
   "The Dong with a luminous Nose!"

     Long years ago
   The Dong was happy and gay,
Till he fell in love with a Jumbly Girl
   Who came to those shores one day.
For the Jumblies came in a Sieve, they did, -
Landing at eve near the Zemmery Fidd
     Where the Oblong Oysters grow,
   And the rocks are smooth and gray.
And all the woods and the valleys rang
With the Chorus they daily and nightly sang, -
     "Far and few, far and few,
     "Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
     "Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
     "And they went to sea in a Sieve."

Happily, happily passed those days!
     While the cheerful Jumblies staid;
   They danced in circlets all night long,
   To the plaintive pipe of the lively Dong,
     In moonlight, shine, or shade.
For day and night he was always there
By the side of the Jumbly Girl so fair,
With her sky-blue hands, and her sea-green hair,
Till the morning came of that hateful day
When the Jumblies sailed in their Sieve away,
And the Dong was left on the cruel shore
Gazing - gazing for evermore, -
Ever keeping his weary eyes on
That pea-green sail on the far horizon, -
Singing the Jumbly Chorus still
As he sate all day on the grassy hill, -
     "Far and few, far and few,
     "Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
     "Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
     "And they went to sea in a Sieve."

But when the sun was low in the West,
   The Dong arose and said, -
"What little sense I once possessed
   "Has quite gone out of my head!"
And since that day he wanders still
By lake or forest, marsh and hill,
Singing - "O somewhere, in valley or plain
"Might I find my Jumbly Girl again!
"For ever I'll seek by lake and shore
"Till I find my Jumbly Girl once more!"

   Playing a pipe with silvery squeaks,
   Since then his Jumbly Girl he seeks,
   And because by night he could not see,
   He gathered the bark of the Twangum Tree
     On the flowery plain that grows.
     And he wove him a wondrous Nose, -
   A Nose as strange as a Nose could be!
Of vast proportions and painted red,
And tied with cords to the back of his head.
   - In a hollow rounded space it ended
   With a luminous Lamp within suspended,
     All fenced about
     With a bandage stout
     To prevent the wind from blowing it out;-
   And with holes all round to send the light,
   In gleaming rays on the dismal night.

And now each night, and all night long,
Over those plains still roams the Dong;
And above the wall of the Chimp and Snipe
You may hear the squeak of his plaintive pipe
While ever he seeks, but seeks in vain
To meet with his Jumbly Girl again;
Lonely and wild - all night he goes, -
The Dong with a luminous Nose!
And all who watch at the midnight hour,
From Hall or Terrace, or lofty Tower,
Cry, as they trace the Meteor bright,
Moving along through the dreary night, -
   "This is the hour when forth he goes,
   "The Dong with a luminous Nose!
   "Yonder - over the plain he goes,
     "He goes!
     "He goes;
   "The Dong with a luminous Nose!"

by Edward Lear

Who wouldn't want this?

He He He(lium)

So why does inhaling helium make one's voice higher?

Actually, it doesn't.  Nope, helium does not cause you to talk at a higher pitch...what it does, precisely, is elicit a squeakier timbre. 

And here we get into some acoustics...hmm if I were being paid for this, no doubt I would do a bit more research, but off the top of my head...so timbre, or tone quality, is basically anything that isn't (1) pitch or (2) loudness.  It's what makes a saxophone different from a violin, even if they're playing the same note.  And I belieeeve it's got something to do with fundemental frequencies and harmonics.

In addition to distinguishing jazz and classical, timbre also helps us differentiate voices with and without good old periodic element He.  You may have noticed that when helium's in the vocal tract, basically the only sounds that are actually affected are the vowels.  Well that's not quite true - any voiced phoneme will do - but the point is, you can hiss like a snake as long as you like, and you won't sound any squeakier until you vibrate those vocal folds.  That's because of how helium works.  And finally I'm getting to my answer. 

Inhaling brings air to your lungs (of course).  Speaking then releases this gas out of your lungs in specific, controlled streams and bursts.  That's all well and good, but keep in mind that helium is lighter than air, as any first-grader who's had a birthday party can tell you.  This lighter, less dense medium plays a trick on the vocal folds - and on the brain that's hearing the sounds these vocal folds are making.  When we hear speech, we are hearing the combination of two things - the vibration of larynx, etc. and the vibration of air molecules.  While helium doesn't alter the former, it does change the latter - the speed of sound in helium is significantly greater than that in a denser material.  And it is this property that alters the resonance patterns - the timbre - of what we hear.

For more info (and some amusing Australian? sound-bytes...especially the last two), click here.

*NOTE: Inhaling helium, almost by definition, means not inhaling oxygen...so don't overdo it, okay?  Also, definitely don't try inhaling anything ever directly from a pressurized canister or container.  And furthermore..! If you're especially brainy (or at least, if I've explained this with a modicum of coherency), it would probably occur to you that inhaling a high density Noble gas - say, Xenon - would decrease the speed of sound and result in a deep, booming baritone (or something of the sort - I can't figure out if singing voice is a factor of pitch or timbre).  And you would be right...however, keep in mind those floaty helium balloons, and consider how, exactly, one might empty their lungs of denser-than-air Xenon once it has been inhaled.  We're not talking carbon monoxide here, but...play it safe, okay kiddos?

Alan R.

ha ha ha...

The Best Kind of Anthropology

There are many reasons why I believe I'm living in the wrong century...and here are just a few of them:

 

[All of these have been shamelessly pilfered from another anthropologist's website - feel free to go there and drool at your leisure.]

A Hole in the Head

This topic has always been ghoulishly interesting to me.  Well, maybe not always.  But for a while now at least.

Trepanning (or trephining) is probably not a totally unfamiliar word?  For me, it tends to conjure up images of primitive, straggly-haired (or possibly tonsured, for easy access) people wearing skins and scratchy shirts gathered around smoking fires with rusty implements, gouging each others' brains out.  However, as with most things, it's a bit more complex than my vivid imagination depicts.

I'm not entirely erroneous, though...in fact, the drilling of burr holes is the earliest known surgical procedure, so the skins and shirts may not be too far off.  (If it seems surprising that poking holes in the skull was the first doctoring that ancient man decided to attempt, keep in mind that soft tissue doesn't survive so long as bones.)  Neolithic archaeology indicates this brutal procedure was not uncommon.  And brutal it must have been, with nothing but weakly fermented alcohol to dull the pain of drilling through scalp and skull; however, if we're going to be logical (and we're going to return to the above illustration), rusty it wouldn't have been - it seems that stone and bone tools shaped like pointed teeth were the surgical implements of the day.

It also seems that the procedure wasn't lethal - or at least, that it didn't spell death.  Analysis of skulls that underwent trepanning reveal bone growth, indicating that a fair number evaded infection, hemorrhaging, and excessive brain damage to live out the remainder of their lives.  Indeed, the positive effects of trepanning made the procedure persist not only through time but also across continents.  Prehistoric Germanic and Celtic tribes may (arguably) have started the practice, but holy skulls have been found in South America, and even farther afield.  (Although, as an archaeologist, it's important to attempt to distinguish patients of trepanning - both successful and not - from victims of post-mortem modification, a.k.a. heads on pikes.)

Although, as anyone will tell you, morbidity is not efficacy.  So why would anyone risk a hole in the head in an age without antibiotics and the rest of modern medicine?  Cave paintings, Greek texts, and 
medieval, and Rennaissance documents provide a slew of answers to this question.  There's some evidence of religious sects using burr holes as part of ritual and tradition, but more medical reasons appear to be the prevailing rationale for trephination.  Epileptic fits, migraine, and the broad category of 'mental disorder' number among the most common.  ...Incidentally, this in itself is quite interesting; for much of human history, the brain, with its fluid-filled ventricles, has been considered nothing much more than a pump.  Nowadays we accept the concept of the brain as the seat of consciousness, but it hasn't always been so.

One further reason for trepanning is, of course, head injury.  Just as today an ER doctor will bore a burr hole in a thumbnail that has been smashed by a hammer, in days gone by, field surgeons on the battlefield would treat severe head trauma from maces, swords, etc. with a bit of light trepannation.

I do still have some questions...or at least one question...which is, I can't figure out how, in pre-modern times, the surgery was completed.  Was the hole cauterized and left open to the air?  This seems unlikely...was the skin flap sewn back over the top?  In Master and Commander, the opening is filled with a coin...was it standard procedure to use a bit of metal?  How did it not fall off?  Was it wired on?  But perhaps that's not something that intrigues other people.

Anyway, speaking of emergency rooms, trepanning isn't one of those antiquated pseudosciences that can be consigned to the past.  It's still used today in much the same way that it was in my last example: in extreme cases of epidural and subdural hematomas so that blood from damaged tissues or ruptured vessels can safely drain and not exert dangerous pressure on the brain.  This, by the way, is known as craniotomy if the bone is replaced after the procedure and a craniectomy if not.  Cranial burr holes are also used as an access point for brain surgery.  This is, of course, commonly done under general anesthesia, but occasionally neurosurgeons will choose only local anesthetic.  Ironically, the brain itself has no sensory nerves and so cannot feel pain; only the exterior tissues have these receptors.  For these types of surgeries, a patient will need to be awake and alert during surgery during cortical mapping so that the surgeon can ascertain what tissues are most vital.  Tumors in the temporal lobe, for instance, frequently associated with epilepsy (so perhaps the ancients weren't so far wrong..?) are often treated in this way.

That's not to say trepanning needs to make a comeback.  It's a technique that should certainly not be abused (like lobotomy), and can in certain cases remain a pseudoscience (like phrenology).  Modern-day cults and sects have occasionally advocated the procedure to increase blood flow to the brain, enhance activity and productivity, decrease fatigue and depression, or allow for heightened religious consciousness and awareness.  And while I've taken cultural anthropology of medicine and am willing to live and let live when it comes to strange medical practices...if I ever get unhappy, I feel I'd need trepanning like...well, like a hole in the head.

TechnoViking

It's just that kind of a day...



Enjoy your meme.