Eel hunting is called eeling and is a popular sport practiced by eelers - people trained in catching eels and surviving the shock.

Although an electric eel can be mistaken for a snake, its more accurately classified as a fish, an aquatic vertebrate animal with scales that has a capacity to produce an electric field using specialized cells distributed throughout its body. The larger the eel, the greater the charge, serving as a major defense against predators and incapacitating prey up to 15 feet away.

Now, engineers from Yale University have designed a man made tool adapting the principles of the electric eel cell by not only replicating them but improving on their design. They claim that artificial versions of the eel’s electricity generating cells could be developed as a power source for medical implants and other tiny devices.

Other engineers of the new field of systems biology question if we really understand enough about how a cell produces electricity to do a better job of designing them than nature has.  In an experiment at the Kakamigahara institute, Japanese scientists wondered if it were possible to harness the eel’s power for economic use. They attached a conductive copper wire from a fish tank to a Christmas tree fully ornamented with lights. Every time the eel scraped against the wire, the tree lit up. Despite all this science, a more common place to find an eel is marinated and served on a sushi plate.

“Even a man who is pure in heart

And says his prayers by night

May become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms

And the autumn moon is bright”

Among Europe’s most popular legends are the Strigoi, known as the tortured souls that rise from the dead with the ability to transform themselves into animals, drain energy from their victims and make themselves invisible. Some scholars argue that they can be living beings with supernatural instincts instilled with the power to move objects, control the passage of time and possess special insight to foretell the future.

There are many stories about what lurks in the forests of Europe where the Strigoi dwell as human sized predatory creatures with unusual speed. A ripe subject for literature, cinema and television. They tell the common tale of chronic dissatisfaction with life, cursed while trapped within a fear of change. The only other way to attain immortality is by seeing though the illusion of life’s addiction and ascend, aware only of movement since direction is subjective. But even to do that, one still has to suffer as does the tortured souls most feared in myths in an ironic twist of fate.

Although he never refers to the undead, Woody Allen has included some witty dialogue about chronic dissatisfaction in his 2008 film, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, “Life is short, life is dull and full of pain and this is a chance for something special.” Some of the directors words also seem to explain why love stories between humans and the Strigoi are so compelling, “Only unfulfilled love can be romantic,”  as images of Edward and Bella, Angel and Buffy are evoked.

Most of the claims about the Strigoi have been dismissed as hallucinations, fables usually attributed to a curse using breadcrumbs to lure an audience as a common ploy of witches who live in candy houses somewhere in the woods of the Carpathian mountains where beasts prey upon lost souls who only know what they don’t want, effectively becoming yet another victim of chronic dissatisfaction.

Sixty years earlier the film Abbott And Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) took a comical look at the undead. A respected horror film that is considered by the American Film Institute (AFI) among the top 100 films of American cinema. The plot is set in Florida and surrounds four different kind of Strigoi as Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster are smuggled out of eastern Europe as wax dummies pursued by the man who turns into the werewolf while the invisible man makes a cameo appearance at the end of the film. Even though he cannot be seen a voice is heard, “allow me to introduce myself, I’m the invisible man.”

Although none of them appear in a Woody Allen film, all of them were effected by chronic dissatisfaction and madness.

It was the ancient ones who first recognized the nature of cycles,  passing down the knowledge, gifted in written text and oral traditions to the chosen of each generation to keep records of what was meant. The task for them was to create an atmosphere where harmony exists without interfering with choice.

The ancient ones were aware that cosmic forces are immense and subtle, remaining invisible until sensitivity to them is developed much as knowledge is often hidden among the clutter of pointless facts noticed before a truth is revealed.  On the other hand they contended that “nothing is useless as long as its appropriately prioritized.” An approach no different than subjecting students to a multiple choice test who are given more information then they need to choose the correct answer, a way of encouraging the development of  knowledge by also sharpening the ability to use a sound process of elimination (guessing).

Who the ancient ones were is less important than what they said about the universe describing it as “a lot of space with ‘things’ suspended within, in constant motion  as everything moves in relation to their previous position and/or mutual gravitational effects on each other.” They were aware of the closest and farthest currents although they attracted less attention by being silent and occasionally leaving inspiring hints along the way, sometimes misinterpreted, becoming the basis for cults.

According to them, the universe could be interpreted as a conduit for the cosmic pulse, while the veil is defined as “anything that is not known,” frequently misunderstood as a symbol for whatever prevents revelation, neglecting to consider its dual purpose as a protection from the knowledge one is not ready to receive. They indicated, “the ability to verify existence or calculate cycles is not necessary to understand the imperceptible.”  Only a rudimentary comprehension of mathematics is important as one silently listens to the cosmic breadth and reads the poetry of light, sound and motion.

Fragments of fable and myth  have been passed down revealing some things about the first ancient one, said to have been born in a small town in the Himalayan Mountains.  Originally the youth, like the other men of the village, was a peaceful farmer. However, an elder villager held in great respect somehow gained certain  knowledge which he shared with the one who later became the first of the ancients. Both began exploring the secrets of the universe learning how to harness cosmic energy for their own uses, although their motives were quite different. While the elder focused on  building a vast empire, the youth wished to use it for the benefit of his fellow villagers. A great struggle ensued between the two, symbolic of the battle between selfishness and selflessness, as  the legacy of the ancient ones remains a contemporary theme about power.

Another reminder of cycles are found in  remnants of The Mayan civilization, which constructed the most mathematically accurate calender ever devised, informed with future astronomical events which influenced their culture along with paganism and human sacrifice. Survival they realized depended on planting crops at the right time and understanding the forces that effected their growth much of which involved cycles of climatic regularity and change. They found ways to ensure a continuation of their society until they vanished, leaving only mystery and myth for scientists to fathom, although their calender and some written hieroglyphs remain.

The Mayan calender calculates the end of one cycle and the beginning of another at 11:11 am GMT on December 21, 2012.  All they contended was that the transformation from one to another would be characterized by “great changes,” as the Sun and its planets approach the center of the galaxy, an event that occurs once in twenty eight thousand years.

What happens after this date is unwritten suggesting that it must be left to those who are now alive to determine the shape and intensity of the change.

In Hinduism, Avatar is a  Sanskrit word referring to the conscious descent of a deity from heaven to earth often translated into English as “incarnation,” but a  more appropriate term is “manifestation.” Its meaning is the basis of James Cameron’s visual epic that took fourteen years to complete depicting native life of Pandora, a planet that takes several years to reach in suspended animation. The film is an artistically stunning adventure in 3D worth seeing  even if the story, written in two weeks, is a bit derivative with a  screenplay that borrows heavily from some of the directors previous work and brings to mind too many similarities to Dances With Wolves.

The military look of the film is so reminiscent of  Aliens that it distracted me from  becoming immersed in the film. Aliens is the 1986 classic that Cameron directed about the bugs that gestate in the chest of its living host and have acid for blood. As in Aliens, the company or corporation features prominently as the prime antagonist of evil instigating  the invasion force that plans to drain Pandora’s natural resources for the benefit of Earth. Our planet is now an ecologically depleted waste land, a victim of economic greed that Weavers character, Dr. Grace Augustine, a Bio-Anthropologist opposes as passionately as she did as Ellen Ripley in Aliens.

The feel of the film’s technology including a cargo loader machine similar to the one Ripley uses to defeat the queen bug at the end of Aliens is featured in facsimile in a major battle scene at the end of Avatar. This similarity is an annoying element of this new film which was written, directed and produced by Cameron with a running time of 2 hours and 40 minutes.

Although the 3D nature of the films construction is groundbreaking, the plot is predictable and the characters are too two dimensional drawing  heavily from other science fiction/ fantasy films. The premise that all living things emanate a common energy also known as “the force”  fills everything in the universe is perhaps a reference to the  Star Wars universe , not that there is anything wrong with imitation, but even the forests of Pandora,  a magical place  with luminescent creatures and large revered trees  evokes the image of Lothlorien the mystical home  of the elves of Middle Earth. Add to all this the notion of cloning a personal avatar and a neural link, then  Alien Resurrection and The Matrix comes  to mind. But despite all its flaws, Avatar is worth seeing if only to make one realize that Star Trek (2009) is a much better film.

Although The Nutritional Aspects Of Expanding Populations sounds like a worthy subject for serious study in Biochemistry and Nutrition especially when considering the impact of the large spike in population growth during the post war period and its sociological implications on the  baby boom generation, it became the basis for a landmark 1955 cinematic classic  about the development of a growth serum and how it could be used to solve the problem of overpopulation and world hunger, a neglected subject in the mid fifties.

The elixir depicted in this film adaptation is so potent its promise is in providing the complete nutritional needs of any growing organism, a claim overshadowed only by the myopic scientific experimentation focused solely on animal rather than plant life which could have made it more palatable for vegetarians and provide a sound basis for reducing cardio-vascular disease when coupled by increased exercise and the cessation of smoking.

The film is titled Tarantula and was directed by Jack Arnold and stars John Agar,  Leo J. Carroll and Mara Corday with an uncredited appearance of twenty-five year old Clint Eastwood as a jet pilot dropping napalm at the films’ climax. Arnold went on to direct The Incredible Shrinking Man two years later in 1957 considered by many as his masterpiece and  Eastwood became a multiple Oscar winning director.

In this scenario,  Professor Gerald Deemer  is a scientist with a just motive, a hero trying to avert food shortages which are predicted as a result of the world’s expanding population of two billion in 1955, a role passionately played by veteran character actor Leo J Carroll. This is the premise that sets it apart from most giant bug movies featuring  mutations caused by either nuclear weapons or a demented scientist. In this case its a result of noble intentions gone wrong with a sound display of scientific methodology and  multi layered sub plots such as a budding love story and a rare medical condition known as acromegaly artistically shot in black and white featuring an arid desert with whistling tumbleweeds. It is here Professor Deemer invents a special nutrient on which animals can exclusively thrive causing them to enlarge many times their normal size to serve as a source of food.

Harvested in the professors’ home laboratory are several over-sized rodents and a tarantula that escapes somewhere  in the California, Nevada area, hungry and lurking for prey, growing and yet undetected despite  leaving pools of arachnid venom and skeletal remains whenever it fed.  Why spiders and rodents were used to experiment on instead of cattle or sheep is left unexplained, but  perhaps it  suggests that Deemer thought there may be a time when a high protein diet would be defined by how many legs are on the plate.

Unthinkable imagery created by very sophisticated  visual effects and score, the film has a sharp   witty script written by Robert Fresco and  Martin Berkele based on a story by Ray Bradbury, yet its science fiction basis never diminishes the credibility that advancing bio technology may one day lead to the discovery of such a nutrient with unanticipated consequences.

When a very bored hotel concierge  asks Corday, a 1954 Playboy centerfold who  arrives in town as a biology student working on her Masters dissertation, The Nutritional Aspects Of Expanding Populations and Agar who plays the town doctor, “Well ain’t you going to introduce yourselves?” as they leave the hotel for a ride in his car.

“No” they respond in unison, as the hotel manager scratches his head and  mutters,   “Yep, it can be an awfully fast world.”

The Academy Of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced that it will be awarding an honorary Oscar to Roger Corman, the director/producer with a vast array of low budget horror films including The Attack Of The Crab Monsters (1957) and Not Of This Earth (1957). Also among his long list of achievements are loose interpretations of many Edgar Allen Poe’s novella’s as The Pit And The Pendulum (1957) and macabre poems such as The Raven (1963). The films were often over the top and frequently starred the late Vincent Price as the demented protagonist.

So many of Corman’s films are considered B- classics, produced on a low budget, shot in several days and elevating exploitation to an art form that it’s easy to forget the list of distinguished directors and actors who were mentored by him such as Martin Scorsese, Frances Ford Coppola, Ron Howard, Peter Bogdanovich, Jonathan Demme , John Sayles,  James Cameron, Jack Nicholson, Robert DeNiro, David Carradine, Peter Fonda, Talia Shire, Dennis Hopper and so many more. These filmmakers got their first break as members of the elite Roger Corman School of Film Making. All genres owe a debt of gratitude to his visionary form of schlock.

One of his most intriguing works and a personal favorite is the prophetic 1960 pre bot-ox tour de force, The Wasp Woman starring Susan Cabot in the title role as Janice Starlin, the owner and CEO of a cosmetic firm at a time when women did not mingle in the business world let alone run corporations. When sales of her beauty products began to slide as her consumer base realizes she is aging, she was motivated to become the chief patron of a scientist who had devised a method to extract enzymes from the royal jelly of the queen wasp that can reverse the aging process. Starlin agrees to fund further research provided she can serve as his human subject. Displeased with the slowness of the results, she breaks into the scientist’s laboratory after hours and injects herself with extra doses of the formula, causing an unanticipated side effect, transforming her into an angry woman with the head and arms of a wasp resulting in quite a buzz,  aggressively killing all the men on the board of trustees of Starlin Enterprises, sacrificing everything for a youthful appearance. A perfect character study for aging actors and actresses obsessed with reversing the effects of time.

Corman’s last directorial achievement for American International Pictures was Gas-s-s-s (1971), also known by the title, It Became Necessary To Destroy The World In Order To Save It. A dark comedy of a post-apocalyptic gas leak at a military installation that kills everyone on Earth over the age of 25. Look closely for the performances of Ben Vereen, Cindy Williams, and a young Talia Shire.

The noted producer/ director was once quoted as saying, “I can make a film about the fall of the Roman Empire with two extras and a sagebrush,” also appeared in minor acting roles in such films as The Silence Of The Lambs, Apollo 13 and Philadelphia and was given the title, “King Of The Bs,” a reference to over 400 films he has been associated with. The bad news is that the Academy has opted not to present any of the honorary awards during the live telecast, but will give them at the governors award dinner on November 14th. The other honorary awards being bestowed are to actress Lauren Bacall and cinematographer Gordon Willis.

For a complete list of Roger Corman’s cinematic achievements follow the Idbm link

In The Holy Grail Of The Unconsciousness, an article appearing in the the September 20th, 2009, New York Times’ Magazine section, Sara Corbett describes the fascinating and unknown history surrounding Liber Novus (L), the unpublished work of Carl Gustave Jung (1875-1961), the founder of Analytic Psychology. These are the handwritten pages of the thinker as he descended into what has been described as severe psychosis for six years.

The text is also known as The Red Book and was penned in German and ornately described as “pages of thick cream-colored parchment, filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils evoking images of medieval times.” Release date is October 7, 2009.

The drama surrounds the reticence of the Jung family, unsure for decades of what to do about publishing this unusual book, fearing it will adversely impact Jung’s legacy. Some who have read it claim it is intensely private and describes it as either the descent of Jung into the underworld of insanity or a transcendental diary of a man chronicling his search by defining his innermost soul.

Over the course of his life, Jung came to see the psyche as inherently spiritual. There is no doubt his thought was greatly influenced by Eastern mysticism, also adopted by The New Age Movement and Theosophy - the school of thought generated by H. B. Blavatsky who wrote Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine. Reincarnation and karma have traditionally been fundamental to Eastern thought, often seen as “on the fringe” by the Western academic world, as was  Jung, especially considering mythology and paganism are also themes threaded throughout his work.

Early on, Jung was a disciple of Sigmund Freud but later wound up as his chief rival. Freud contended that the subconscious was a collection of repressed desires that could be interpreted, classified as pathological and treated in analysis. Jung had a much broader sense of analysis than did Freud, describing it more as a soul’s trans-formative experience then a form of treatment. His approach took him to the border of mystical philosophy and, some say, over the edge into divine madness.

The publication of his Red Book, kept under lock and key for decades by his children and grandchildren, may reveal new insights on the schism between the two foremost thinkers of the Twentieth Century. Some of his descendants have claimed that it’s too private, containing so many unsavory descriptions, part of what could be his dementia, while those from the mystical community might see it more as his unfolding soul’s search as he confronts his dark side. This may change how history views Carl Jung. In any event, it should be an interesting read.

For more information on C.G. Jung, visit this Amazon.com web page.

The number 9 is the natural whole number following 8 ½ and preceding 10, also known as a Motzkin number to indicate the different ways of drawing non intersecting chords on a circle between n points. It’s ordinal adjective is ninth.

A number is evenly divisible by nine if and only if its digital root is 9. For example, adding all the digits of a number until a single digit remains, the digital root of 655,360 is 25, and the square root of 25 is 5. A nine sided polygon is called a Nonagon and a group of nine of anything is called an Annead, quite an odyssey of information.

Nine is also a musical adaptation based on Italian director Federico Fellini’s autobiographical cinematic masterpiece, 8 ½ (Otto e mezzo). The movie was awarded the Best Foreign Film of 1963. His choice of the number as the title of film is said to represent the six feature films, two shorts and the one film Fellini co-directed up to that point. Add music to 8 ½ and you have 9. The film version is currently in production somewhere in Rome and stars Daniel Day-Lewis as Guido Contini and Sophia Loren as Mama in a sweeping epic of creative and sexual reflection set for release November 2009.

links:
- Federico Fellini
- Sophia Loren
- Daniel Day Lewis
- 8 ½
- Motzkin number

September 20th also markes the 75 birthday of Sophia Loren, who has gifted the world with her charm, wit,  grace and elegant beauty. We wish her , her children and grandchildren the very best on this day and for the future.

Happy Birthday Sofia Loren, may you have many more .

A majority of scientists now agree that global warming is a direct result of the burning of fossil fuels and other by-products of the industrial revolution but will decreasing them reverse the process?

The presumption has been that it would but what about forces that are not as noticeable such as declining solar radiation reaching Earth? Global warming has gotten so much focus in recent years, it has obscured attention from data that prove there has been progressive loss of sunlight, unnoticed and un-investigated by scientists for five decades despite considerable statistics. Why has global dimming received so little attention from scientific scrutiny?

During the 1950’s, scientists in Israel and Germany began independently measuring the amount of sunlight hitting the planet. They took accurate calculations of solar radiation levels. Although some articles were published in journals of the time, they failed to draw any widespread notice among the scientific community until the three days following the 9/11 attack, the time when all airlines throughout the United States were grounded.

This event provided an opportunity for scientists to observe solar radiation in the absence of fuel emissions burned by jet planes, and equipped with decades of measurements to compare the results. What they found was alarming: during the three days in September 2001, sunlight over the United States increased dramatically. When plane travel resumed, less sunlight reached Earth.

By this time, scientists in other countries began comparing levels in the same manner, recording solar radiation levels near cities that produced industrial pollutants, comparing them to rural locations. They all came to the same conclusion separately. The amount of sunlight reaching the planet has steadily declined globally since the 1950’s. The only question remaining is what impact would reduced sunlight have on attempts at restoring global homeostasis.

Conventional thought at the time was that the precipitation and evaporation of water, part of the “The Water Cycle” was more dependent on temperature, however records measuring rain patterns worldwide (Pan Evaporation Rate)* showed evidence that the cycle was far more impacted by sunlight. A decrease in solar radiation meant that the rate of evaporation was also declining and having a cooling effect. If pollution disappeared completely overnight, the net effect would be an increase in the speed of global warming rather than the opposite, suggesting that the true rate of warming has been masked, counteracted by global dimming. Quite an alarming thought and a very persuasive argument that could be made by fossil fuel lobbyists to slow down conversion to cleaner forms of energy.

The question I have for scientists is: Why did global dimming take so long to get noticed? All the data was there, yet no one made the connection until the 9/11 attack that grounded all airlines. Science certainly dropped the ball on this one.

references:

- *The pan evaporation rate is determined across the globe by filling a flat pan of water and measuring the amount evaporation within a period of time during the daylight hours.

- Watch the following video on global dimming:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2058273530743771382&ei=l76YSqLxGsPWlQeX0vzQAg&q=global+dimming++&hl=en

Love stories portrayed in literature and film are usually but not always centered around attractive people. In the highly anticipated comedy, Julie And Julia, written and directed by Nora Ephron , the subject of this love story is the marriage of the late Julia Child, the apostle of cooking who died in 2004, two days before her 92nd birthday. In her autobiography, My Life In France, published posthumously in 2006, she chronicles her time in Paris during the post war period before becoming the icon of French cooking popularized in her landmark book, Mastering The Art of French Cooking (1961) which helped make French cuisine accessible to the American public. She first appeared on television as The French Chef in 1963, long before the food network or cable TV was ever conceived. Sometimes, while trying to flip something in the pan, she missed the mark and dropped it on the counter, or floor, smiling as she mumbled, “whose to see?” then picked it up and put it back in the pan.

Child, at 6′2″, a large woman with a shrill husky voice and a somewhat matronly bovine appearance, is flawlessly channeled by Meryl Streep in an astonishing performance revealing a new side to the cooking icon who had a passion for life coupled with a surprisingly sexually charged relationship with her husband Paul Child, who declares his love at a St. Valentine’s dinner party: “Julia, you are the butter to my bread and the breath of my life,” a poetic line, beautifully delivered by Stanley Tucci in a brilliant performance as Julia’s husband, a quiet understated Renaissance man and career diplomat who is her rock of Gibraltar,  proving that uncommon people can be as romantically appealing as Romeo and Juliette.

When she is unsure what to do with the rest of her life, Paul asks “What do you really like to do?” as they sit in a French restaurant.
“Well, I do like to eat.” she responds.
“And you’re so good at it too.”, he says.
“Yes, yes,” both laughing uncontrollably, “and I’m growing right in front of you as we speak,” as she feeds on some fillet of sole.

The movie is constructed like The Hours, a 2002 film based on the Virginia Woolf novel Mrs. Dalloway that won an Oscar for Nicole Kidman as Best Actress. In a similar way, separate story lines are connected through time by a book. In this case, Mastering The Art Of French Cooking, used by Julie Powell, a Queens housewife in 2002, living a drab, uninteresting life surrounded by friends who have made it, not knowing what to do with herself until she decides to cook all 534 recipes from Child’s cookbook in one year, then writing about it in a blog: The Julie And Julia Project. Unfortunately, the Julie Powell scenes, played adequately by Amy Adams, are far less interesting than the captivating love story of Julia and Paul Child. The film would have been much better served on a buffet tray had it focused solely on Streep and Tucci’s characters which with all that food on display makes one irresistibly hungry for more by the time it’s over. This adaptation also has some wonderfully colorful scenes of the streets and markets of Paris with a running time of 2 hours and 4 minutes. Never the less, it’s a good film worth seeing before having dinner, perhaps at a French Restaurant.

Meryl Streep proves once again that she is the foremost American actress of her generation and is sure to get a sixteenth Oscar nomination come January 2010.Tucci is outstanding as Paul Child and conveys much with gestures, expressions and eye contact. Julie And Julia is an unusually touching love story between two uncommon people.

For a full list of credits see the Idbm database.

Further references:
Mastering The Art Of French Cooking
My Life In France
Julia Child -
Meryl Streep
Stanley Tucci
Nora Ephron
The French Chef