Monkey Glands

"The physiologist Serge Voronoff, a Russian working in Paris, was one of the most infamous of the gland doctors. He thought that the lazy, mentally disabled, run-down, and aged could be revitalized by testicular transplants. Many wealthy men underwent the costly surgery; Voronoff transplanted the testes of executed criminals into millionaires. Legal contracts were drawn up with prospective donors, but apparently willing individuals were in such short supply that what one scientist called a "despicable trade in organs" began to develop. According to one newspaper, men were even being mugged for their testicles, "knocked unconscious and then robbed of the long-sought-for organs."

Voronoff solved this crisis by slicing and grafting the testicles of monkeys onto those of the men who sought his treatment. In his book, Rejuvenation by Grafting (1925), Voronoff promised the patients who acquired his monkey glands that they’d be able to work longer, and that they would be blessed with improved memories, eyesight, and sex drives. He set up a special breeding center on the Italian Riviera for chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans that was run by a former circus-animal keeper. ..."

I really think this magazine is really, really great (but not so great that I'd pay for it...).

from Vasectomania and Other Cures for Sloth, Christopher Turner

www.cabinetmagazine.org (again)

Visual Cognition Experiment

Today I took part in a visual cognition experiment. It involved putting my gulliver in the above padded frame and watching tv for an hour; the worst of which was 10 minutes of two students playing table tennis. There was no Ludwig Van. I was paid six pounds for my time though, and when the hour was up I was deemed fit to rejoin society.

Man Machine

The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) program was established at Princeton University in 1979 by Robert G. Jahn, then Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, to pursue rigorous scientific study of the interaction of human consciousness with physical devices, systems, and processes common to contemporary engineering practice. Since that time, an interdisciplinary staff of engineers, physicists, psychologists, and humanists has been conducting a comprehensive agenda of experiments and developing complementary theoretical models to enable better understanding of the role of consciousness in the establishment of physical reality. Though the research of PEAR does state statistical significance, there exist critics who wish to further examine PEAR methodologies and may question their interpretation of the collected data.

"In the end, it took the better part of a year (and something close to $100,000) to realize the handsome device that adorned the wall of the PEAR laboratory for some twenty years, and that clattered through more than ten thousand cycles under the watchful eye of hundreds of experimenters who sat on the plush couch before it and thought “go right” or “go left” for hours on end. The total tally and final configuration of each run (a full cycle took about fifteen minutes) were meticulously recorded in dozens of laboratory notebooks, which amount to the archival residue of the most sustained effort ever undertaken to test whether, in fact, faith can move a mountain—a small, controlled mountain of polystyrene balls. "

"Human minds can affect random physical processes, to a minor but statistically detectable degree..."

http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/34/burnett.php

sounds of space

http://www-pw.physics.uiowa.edu/space-audio/

I recently heard some "solar music" on a scientific radio show. Scientists specialising in the sun were saying the inside of the sun vibrates like a goddamn guitar! The sound waves coming from the core, although unrecordable as such because of the burning hellfire, reverberate to the surface and their frequencies would translate into melodic, harmonious sounds.

Not so easy to find this stuff but I'll keep looking

Set the controls for the heart of the sun

Jodrell Bank

From the original 1951 proposal for the worlds biggest steerable telescope at Jodrell Bank. The document, which is a hand bound blue book, has been scanned and posted on the Jodrell Bank website. It's not much of page-turner, but the presentation is quite pleasing in its lack of polish.

I don't know whether the place is particularly significant today. I used to visit here quite a lot as a child. Big stuff.

Haüy

Mineralogist Rene Just Häuy stumbled upon christal structure by accident, and basically went on to lay some foundations for modern christallography. He was very impressed by the geometric, symetric structure of christals, and so created laws, categories and so forth.