10.26.07
Posted in News of the World, What I'm Reading, Science, Weird Science, Reality is Weird at 10:39 pm by Spencer
The article below just appeared on the front page of the Seattle P-I. According to multiple accounts, shrimp, crab, and fish being sold in groceries in the Seattle area actually glows in the dark. Does the FDA care? Hell no. Count on the Bush FDA to keep us safe from rogue bio-engineered mutants or possibly “nukuler” radiated food…not. They won’t even let their scientists comment on the subject, which is about what you’d expect from the cronyist “free market” retards.
Also so very reassuring is the fact the dumb-asses at Washington Poison Center “wouldn’t hesitate” to eat GLOWING FISH AND SHRIMP. According to this article, even cats know better than the idiots charged with “protecting” our food supply. What the hell?!?
Possibly worst of all, the story is being treated as a mildly humorous human interest piece! I can only conclude that Ming the Merciless on Planet Mongo has unleashed the StupidAssRetardifier Ray on humanity while I was resting in my handy lead box. I can see where this is leading, so please shoot me in the face when Paris Hilton is floated as a viable candidate for President, won’t you?
(And, alas, count on the P-I to be lame enough to actually lose the domain name seattlepi.com to bottom-feeding cybersquatters after owning it for more than a decade. Sigh.)
Glow-in-the-dark shrimp — it’s all a little fishy
Luminescent crustaceans bought in Seattle stores; FDA won’t investigate
By Andrew Schneider
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Thursday, October 25, 2007
It sounds like a Halloween joke. A pile of brightly glowing cooked shrimp sitting on the counter in a darkened kitchen.
But Randall Peters doesn’t see the humor in it. He bought the shrimp last week from the West Seattle Thriftway. He ate some that evening and returned to the kitchen a few minutes later.
“It was like a bright eerie light was shining on it,” said Peters, who works for a natural food store.
“I thought that maybe it had been overirradiated, you know, too much radiation. Now, whenever I buy seafood, I take it home and turn out the lights.”
Another batch of glowing shrimp apparently was bought at a Quality Food Center in Wallingford.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it was not going to investigate the Seattle episodes because no “official, through-the-proper-channels” report was made.
“Further,” a spokeswoman added, “it’s not a food safety issue because no one got sick.”
Glowing seafood has been reported in the past. A government report in the ’90s said some products exhibited luminescence from the presence of certain light-emitting bacteria — a chemical reaction similar to that found in fireflies. There are at least nine luminescent species of bacteria in salt water.
Andy Richards, manager of the seafood department at the Thriftway, calls the glowing shrimp “creepy.”
He said he took Peters’ report seriously but believes it’s an isolated incident and doesn’t present a health hazard.
“We don’t hear a lot of complaints about glowing seafood, but then people rarely look at their shrimp and crab in the dark.”
However, Richards admits that he might “take a peek” at the seafood now and then in a darkened freezer “just in case.”
A caller who identified herself only as Barbara told the Seattle P-I on Monday that she had given some cooked shrimp she bought at the QFC in Wallingford to her three “very large” cats Sunday night as a “birthday treat.”
An hour later, she said, she was frightened at what she found. She saw a greenish-blue glow coming from the cat bowl on the darkened porch. When she turned on the light, she found the six shrimp untouched. Her porky cats, which she said “would eat your leg off if you stood in one place long enough,” didn’t touch them.
She pulled open the refrigerator door. The light bulb had burned out weeks ago, she said, but the plastic bag holding the remaining shrimp glowed brightly in the chilled darkness.
Neither Peters nor Barbara, who also ate some of the shrimp, said they were made ill, just a bit queasy at the idea of consuming the glowing seafood.
“I wouldn’t hesitate to eat the stuff,” said Dr. Bill Robertson of the Washington Poison Center, when asked about the safety of consuming the glowing food.
“I don’t know of any studies that show it’s hazardous, but, then again, I can’t envision anyone spending the money to do the costly tests to prove it’s safe,” the medical toxicologist said.
Some might expect the FDA would test glowing seafood.
Fortunately, the agency’s Seafood Product Research Center is in Bothell. Unfortunately, it hasn’t done anything on glowing seafood for almost a decade, said the center’s spokeswoman, who declined to permit any of the scientists to discuss the topic. The spokeswoman said the only research into luminescent bacteria or phosphorescing phytoplankton in seafood was begun about 20 years ago by Patricia Sado, an FDA microbiologist.
Sado’s study, which was published in 1998, examined reports of glowing seafood in the mid-1990s to health departments, poison centers and FDA offices across the country.
The products involved were imitation crabmeat, lobster and shrimp, herring, sardines and the always mysterious seafood salads.
Sometimes all that was left were the glowing plastic foam trays or empty wrappers.
A man in Aberdeen reported his fingers glowed after he and his wife ate some crabmeat.
Fresh, uncooked fish also were reported as glowing in the dark. A team of Environmental Protection Agency investigators evaluating the pollution of the Columbia River near the Hanford Nuclear Reservation were stopped by members of the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation of Oregon. They had 200 to 300 pounds of brightly glowing fish — whole king salmon they planned to use in a ceremony.
They were afraid to eat it because they believed the fish were radioactive, Sado reported. The analysis found the salmon — skin, intestine and gills — heavily contaminated with a bacterium called Photobacterium phosphoreum.
The reports the microbiologist collected listed only one death attributed to a bioluminescent seafood, and this was not from consumption of the bacterium but rather a 72-year-old man who cut himself while cleaning fish.
The ailments most often reported by Sado were headaches, nausea, vomiting, abdominal cramping and diarrhea — symptoms similar to most food poisonings. However, many of her case studies — like Peters and Barbara — reported no health problems.
The FDA scientist — now retired and living in the Seattle area — still retains her interest in bioluminescence.
“It is just fascinating to study,” she said in an interview this week. “But people who see their seafood glowing should not think they’re crazy nor that the aliens have landed. There are reasons backed by solid science.”
She believes the problems at the Seattle stores probably were the result of cross-contamination. Cooking the product kills the luminescent bacteria and pathogens.
“Boiling the shrimp would have killed the P. phosphoreum, so the contamination probably happened after cooking,” she said. “Somewhere, either in the grocery that sold the product or the plant where the cooked shrimp were packed, contamination from uncooked seafood had to get on the shrimp. This could present a problem.”
The shrimp from the two stores were supplied by Ocean Beauty Seafood.
“We’ve spoken to the folks at Thriftway and QFC and are addressing their concerns,” said Jim Yonkers, director of corporate quality assurance for the Seattle-based seafood company, the largest in the Pacific Northwest.
“We’re going back to the eastern Canadian company that supplied the shrimp to us to discuss the procedures that they use. That’s only common sense.”
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03.15.07
Posted in News of the World, Avant Experiwhosis, Weird Science at 9:51 pm by Spencer
Courtesy of Bovine Inversus comes this slightly disturbing news item from the Korea Times. The start-up may get some business, but somehow I don’t think it’ll be Sony, Nintendo, or Xbox who will be queuing up. Paging Donald Rumsfeld…
Acoustic Wave Prevents Game Addiction
By Kim Tae-gyu
Korea Times (Seoul), March 12, 2007
A Korean venture start-up has developed an inaudible sound sequence, which it claims can prevent obsessive use of online games, thus giving hope to game addicts.
Xtive on Monday said the sound sequence is based on subliminal effects.
“We incorporated messages into an acoustic sound wave telling gamers to stop playing. The messages are told 10,000 to 20,000 times per second,” Xtive President Yun Yun-hae said.
“Game users can’t recognize the sounds. But their subconscious is aware of them and the chances are high they will quit playing,” the 35-year-old Yun said. “Tests tell us the sounds work.”
Xtive, which was established in 2005, spent about a year to create the sound sequence geared toward addressing the concern that Korean teenagers spend too much time playing computer games.
The addiction to the network games has turned into a serious social problem and some gamers have even died after long sessions in front of the computer.
Experts point out roughly 10 to 20 percent of high school students can be categorized as Web junkies who need treatment. And many believe that is a conservative perspective.
“Experiences tell us kids or adolescents simply don’t stop playing games when faced with forceful measures. Such attempts can also cause many side effects,” Yun said.
“But our newly developed sound sequence tells them to stop playing on their own. We think this can make a real difference in the war against obsessive game play,” he said.
Yun said Xtive plans to commercialize the phonogram along with the government [emphasis added] and game companies.
“Game companies can install a system, which delivers the inaudible sounds after it recognizes a young user has kept playing after a preset period of time,” Yun said.
Xtive applied for a domestic patent for the phonogram and is looking to take advantage of the technology in other sectors.
“We can easily change the messages. In this sense, the potential for this technology is exponential,” Yun said. [Emphasis added.]
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02.22.06
Posted in Whatever, Nifty Links, Science, Weird Science at 10:40 pm by Spencer
Courtesy of the WFMU Blog comes the jaw-droppingly disturbing and equally amazing post, “A Brief History of Disembodied Dog Heads”. Whatever you do, make sure to visit the video archive depicting 1954 experiments by Soviet scientist Vladimir Demikhov, particularly the clip M10_ 4_005.wmv.
Any fan of crappy ’50s and ’60s sci-fi flicks knows of rather odd proliferation of movies dealing with head transplants, two-headed men (e.g. The Manster), and heads somehow kept alive in lab trays. Well, turns out there were actual, real, serious scientists working on just such strangeness.
Well…throw some Roky Erickson on the turntable, sit back, and learn all about the secret history of, um, dog head transplants. And stuff. No really.
Seriously. Disturbing. And. Bizarre.
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02.14.06
Posted in Whatever, News of the World, Weird Science at 7:44 pm by Spencer
Twelve-year-old Florida seventh-grader Jasmine Roberts took the top prize at her school’s science fair for proving that fast food restaurant toilet water is less contaminated than their ice.
Ms. Roberts took samples from five (unnamed) fast food joints within a 10-mile radius of the University of South Florida. She gathered samples of their toilet water (flushing first and using sterile gloves and sterile beakers), and also obtained cups of ice from their drive-up windows. The samples were then tested at the Moffit Cancer Center, where she volunteers with a USF professor.
Ms. Roberts reported her tests showed that “70-percent of the time, the ice from the fast food restaurants contain more bacteria than the fast food restaurant’s toilet water.”
Neither she nor her honors science teacher were surprised.
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01.16.06
Posted in Whatever, Music, Avant Experiwhosis, Me, Science, Weird Science, Chicago at 10:23 pm by Spencer
I stumbled across a nice selection of articles on various aspects of audio entrainment at the web site of the Center for Neuroacoustic Research. Such information tends to be rather hard to come by, so carpe diem. My only bitch — and it’s a major one — is the stupid web designer made the damn layout too wide even for a 1024×768 screen resolution. Get a clue, will ya? But anyway…well worth the effort.
“Entrainment” is a fascinating phenomenon whereby external stimuli pulsing at frequencies equivalent to specific wave states of the human (and presumably animalian) brain can — and will — cause the brain to sync up. Even more astonishing — to me at least — is the corresponding perceptual/experiential state then ensues in the subject.
This was first done using fields created by electromagnets placed in close proximity to the skull. I first learned of this in a late-1980s article in ye olde Omni magazine detailing the work of one Dr. José M. Delgado — one of those brain researchers whose work crops up in the mind control lit (and for good reason) and who has in fact done Scary Research in that realm for the US government. We’re talking implants and such. Probably his most famous experiment was in the late ’50s, I believe, when he instantly pacified a charging bull simply by pressing the button on a hand-held remote control, triggering a device that had been surgically implanted in the bull’s brain. (Should you doubt such a thing, check out his book Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society (Harper & Row, 1969).)
Somewhere around the time of that Omni article (ca. the late ’80s), it was discovered that sound could achieve the exact same effect. Now, human brain wave states manifest at extremely low frequencies. For example, the Theta state — a dream-like state characterized by intense relaxation and visualization — is right around 6 hertz. Human hearing occupies a range roughly between 20 hertz and 20 kilohertz (and the audibility range of most folks much past their 30s is less than that, even without rock ‘n’ roll or iPods). There ain’t no way you can hear a 6 hertz tone, and ain’t no subwoofer I know of that can even reproduce a tone that low. (Though ya never know what the military might have cooking — but that’s a topic for another day.)
The trick, it turns out, is to use what I call (probably to the intense cringe-afying of the learned) psychoacoustic resonnance frequencies. The principle is simple. If you have two drones tuned just slightly apart — say one at 200 hertz and another at 206 hertz — then the mind perceives what amounts to a harmonic overtone at whatever the interval is between the two tones — in this case, 6 hertz: the magic Theta frequency. Of course, there are other overtones and harmonics as well, some consciously perceived (think Tibetan chants) and some not. But consciously or not, that 6 hertz overtone will work on your brain just as sure as anything.
The New Age and Human Potential folks got ahold of this stuff, and that’s where all those funky “relaxation goggles” in the ’90s came from. You can also find CDs of audio that purport to use audio entrainment to induce instant bliss and make geniuses of babies and whatnot. But despite the New Age marketing hyperbole and the oft (though not always) cracked pots of the mind control conspiracy crowd, the scientific principles are tested and proven.
Around the time I read that Omni article, I was active in the experimental music scene in Chicago. Inspired and most curious, I put together a solo piece, titled Translocation, that sought to use the principles of audio entrainment in a live setting to see what would happen.
Using an old Amiga computer, I was able to lay down a precisely pitched two-tone drone using 200hZ and 206hZ frequencies, with the goal of (hopefully) triggering a Theta state in the audience. This being before affordable digital recording, I taped the drone to 4 track, and used the same deck for playback so I could be (reasonably) confident the tones would be true. This played throughout the piece, and over that I worked in audio collages of similarly-pitched religious trance music from all over the world, as well as live prepared guitar, percussion, and other sonic whatses. I was able to scrabble together a second stereo PA to augment the one the venue already had, and I arrayed the speakers at roughly the four corners of the room. I set the stereo imaging so that instead of being the expected left-right front / left-right back it was more like right-front left-back / left-front right-back. It just seemed like it might sound more interesting.
On stage, I had the 4 track (with some additional collage work laid to the extra two tracks) and a submixer arrangement that allowed me to send two stereo feeds to my dual-PA set-up. I also patched in a couple digital delays, and I was able to control (somewhat) what audio went to which stereo pair using a volume pedal. Basically, it was just a punk-rock “quad” set-up. I patched all my (mostly borrowed) gadgets into my PA spaghetti. I also had a large air duct I’d found in the alley just that day, to which I attached a really fine contact mic sold under the brand name of Drum Bug. Finally, I had my trusty Fender VibroLux amp for the prepared guitar and a couple pedals (though I also split that signal so I could send it to the effects chain feeding the PAs).
(I was poor as shit in them days, so I remain grateful still to the kind folks who did me a solid by lending me all that extra gear. Thanks, guys.)
A side note on the audio collage is definitely warranted here. As I mentioned, I used religious and shamanic trance music from as many different cultures as I could muster from my record collection, everything from Gregorian chants to the obligatory Tibetan chants to stuff from all over Africa, the Middle East, aboriginal America and, hell, all over and back. I recorded the collage over a long night while doing my then-steady DJing gig at a different local club. DJ turntables, as you know, have sliders that allow you to change the pitch of the records so you can better match them when sequeing between them (or playing them at the same time, as is your wont). What amazed me while I was spinning was that I barely had to repitch any of the recordings. It didn’t matter what continent, culture or century these musics were from, they all were in practically the same key. I was even more pleased — if not entirely surprised by that point — to find afterward that the whole collage (i.e. all these different spiritual trance musics) were very closely pitched to the Theta drone I’d created on the Amiga. So close, in fact, that I didn’t have to make any adjustments to bring the different recordings into tonal parity. I had discovered that these ancient traditions of sonically-induced spiritual ecstacy and meditation had keyed in to a basic physiological property of the human brain.
Right. So, the venue — the dearly departed Club Lower Links — happened to be in a windowless basement, and thus with the owner’s kind induglence I was able to produce near-total darkness, except for some very dim, blue area lights for myself and the bartender. Prior to performing, I didn’t explain anything to the audience about what I was (hopefully) up to; I simply suggested that if they were so inclined they should close their eyes and go with the sounds and…see what happens.
The piece went well, combining the planned and/or mostly fixed elements of the drone and the pre-recorded (though semi-mixable) audio collage with completely improvised stuff on the guitar, air duct, and some other crap I had in my kit bag at the time. I myself didn’t experience anything especially different than usual while playing, but of course I was focused on other things like making pretty racket.
What was really amazing and truly special was what happened afterward. The audience literally lined up and, one after another, regaled me with tales of what they had experienced and/or visualized during the piece. Although a few described generally amorphous feelings of “spaciness”, most related a very vivid experience, though the specifics and even general tenor varied wildly. One person, I recall, said she had a sort of memory experience centering on abuse she’d suffered as a child. (I apologized profusely, but she assured me [I think genuinely] that it really had not been traumatic, but more a view from a reflective distance.) The most baroquely spectacular visual experience described to me — which I won’t belabor here — came, ironcally enough, from a person I knew to never have done any drugs to speak of and rarely even drank. I found this most fascinating, and it left me wondering to what extent efforts at more chemically-induced ecstatic/meditative/visonary states actually dull a more innate ability to get to the same place all on our own.
Although I’ve had the great pleasure of a few folks coming up after a set and expressing pleasure at my experimental oscillations — sometimes trancey stuff, sometimes not — I’ve never had an experience before or since, where folks lined up to share the internal experiences prompted (to whatever extent) by my music. It remains a very special memory for me, for which I can only thank the Muse like any responsible artist should.
Some time later, and in a different venue, I attempted a modified repeat of the same basic approach, with additional musicians and more theatrics. But while that piece was reasonably successful in its own right, it definitely did not achieve the entrainment effect the first one apparently did.
Aaaanyway, the articles referenced at the top of this post provide a variety of perspectives and experimental findings on this fascinating — if more-than-slightly scary — phenomenon of audio entrainment. Use your knowledge only for good, Luke.
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