From high-profile trials to popular TV shows, numerous events have imprinted on our collective psyche the fact that DNA evidence can be used to solve crimes. But the technique has extensive uses that go far beyond forensic science. You may even owe tonight’s dinner, in part, to DNA fingerprinting.

My curiosity about this subject was piqued when I came across a recent newspaper report that talked about how DNA fingerprinting is being used in India to identify different varieties of basmati rice. The report mentioned a hotel that buys around 200 tons of basmati rice per year. The hotel’s chefs found it difficult to cook the rice properly because each type of basmati rice has different soaking times and cooking properties. A visual inspection is of limited use because all the varieties look nearly the same. They decided to solve this problem by working with the rice’s producer to certify each bag of rice using DNA fingerprinting; the chefs then use the information to help them determine the proper cooking parameters.

How Does It Work?
DNA sequences are extremely long, and comparing an entire DNA sequence with another would be hard to do. Fortunately, though, about 99% of human DNA is identical from one person to the next. The 1% that’s different includes several frequently repeating sequences; the number of repeating sequences in any given position on a chromosome is different for each person.

Therefore, in DNA fingerprinting, fragments of DNA are extracted and a collection is created that is unique for each person. There are several techniques for doing so; they differ mainly in how the fragments are extracted and how they are converted into a form that can be analyzed for identification.

While human DNA fingerprinting has numerous uses in law and forensics—from verifying paternity to identifying murder suspects—this technique also applies to other organisms. Plants, animals, and even bacteria have unique DNA fingerprints. An increasing range of applications makes use of this fact. For example:

• Fighting Disease: The big problem in treating bacterial infections using antibiotics is the fact that, over time, bacteria become resistant to the antibiotics, thereby making the treatment ineffective. DNA fingerprinting is being used to identify antibiotic-resistant strains. This helps doctors to select an antibiotic other than the one to which the bacteria are resistant, or consider a different type of treatment altogether. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has been using DNA fingerprinting successfully for controlling the spread of tuberculosis (caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis) for the past few years.
• Fighting Foodborne Illnesses: E. coli is a type of bacteria that lives in the intestines of humans and animals and is generally harmless. However, there are a few strains of E. coli that are quite dangerous—such as O157:H7 (sometimes found as a contaminant in beef), which produces a powerful toxin and can cause severe illness. By using DNA fingerprinting, this harmful strain can be identified easily if it’s present in food. After a major outbreak of this E. coli strain in 1993, the CDC created PulseNet, a national network of laboratories that performs DNA fingerprinting on food-borne bacteria. PulseNet has been instrumental in stopping outbreaks by quickly identifying the strain in contaminated food after comparing it against known patterns.
• Fighting Fraud: How do you know that the contents of the bottle of wine or the bottle of medicine you are about to consume is authentic? Wine producers are using DNA fingerprinting to ensure that the correct grapes have gone into the making of the wine, thereby guaranteeing its authenticity. Pharmaceutical manufacturers are working on using DNA fingerprinting for labeling medicines so that counterfeits can be detected more readily. Experts now think that DNA fingerprinting, when combined with rapid detection methods, can give rise to better authentication tools than the ones in use today.
• Genography: Not to be confused with geography, genography (or genetic anthropology) studies the migration patterns of humans over long periods of time. The National Geographic Society has embarked on an ambitious 5-year project that will use DNA fingerprinting to map the journey of human beings since prehistoric times as they migrated to various parts of the globe. They are relying on the fact that some parts of the DNA, called “genetic markers,” are passed down generation to generation without modification. Using these markers, the project attempts to trace the movement of humans over the ages and the path of human evolution from their prehistoric roots in Africa.

As the field of genetic engineering increases in popularity, the range of applications for DNA fingerprinting is likely to widen. Just as with conventional fingerprinting, there is always some margin of error, and ethical questions abound, particularly when humans are involved. But the evidence so far suggests that the potential benefits far outweigh the risks, and the future of DNA fingerprinting looks bright. —Rajagopal Sukumar

Guest author Rajagopal Sukumar lives in Chennai, India and serves as the Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO) of a software consulting company that specializes in the global delivery model. You can read his personal blog at www.sastwingees.org.

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More Information about DNA Fingerprinting...

Interested in writing an article for Interesting Thing of the Day? See our author information page.

This article was featured in Tangled Bank 58.

To learn more about DNA fingerprinting and related topics covered in this article, see:

• The Economic Times article on DNA fingerprinting being used to certify Basmati Rice
• National Geographic’s Genography Project Page that describes the project
• CDC’s page on E. Coli
• Excellent primer on DNA fingerprinting by Dalya Rosner and Chris Smith
• Wikpedia’s entry on Genetic Fingerprinting
• DNA and consumer confidence, an article by Holger Breithaupt in Nature describing the use of DNA fingerprinting for authentication
• CDC’s page on Pulsenet

Related Articles from Interesting Thing of the Day

• Iris Scans
• Honey as Medicine
• Most Recent Common Ancestors
• The Truth About Bananas
• Designer Pets

℗ & © 2006, alt concepts. All rights reserved.

I have always been baffled at the fact that people so frequently go to noisy parties, bars, clubs, and restaurants with the apparent intention of getting to know each other or spend quality time together. How is that supposed to work? How can you have a worthwhile conversation with someone when you must yell over loud music, not to mention all those other people yelling their own conversations at each other? Perhaps my telepathic powers are insufficiently developed, but as an ordinary human, it seems more sensible to me that if you want to talk to someone, you’d go to a place where you can hear and be heard. So I was delighted to learn of a relatively recent phenomenon sweeping the world: quiet parties, where the only rule is “no talking.”

These Go to Zero
The idea for quiet parties came from two New Yorkers, artist Paul Rebhan and musician Tony Noe, who got frustrated trying to find a bar where they could have a quiet conversation in 2002. They invented the quiet party partly for practical reasons and partly as a sort of participatory performance art. Despite—or perhaps because of—New York’s reputation for ubiquitous noise, the parties were an instant hit.

Loud music, yelling, and cell phone use are prohibited at quiet parties; sometimes there’s soft music in the background and sometimes not. Whispering is allowed in designated areas, and occasionally, quiet parties even permit the exchange of text messages and email. But on the whole, participants rely on written notes, mime, and body language to convey their messages. Once partygoers get over the initial discomfort of writing instead of talking, they often find that passing notes makes it easier and less intimidating to approach strangers. And it’s often quite entertaining: there’s no rule against giggling or gasping.

You Had Me at “___”
Quiet parties that are officially sanctioned and promoted by Rehban and Noe take place at a venue that has been specially reserved for the evening, with hosts who explain how it works, pass out pens and paper, and enforce the “no talking” rule. These events, which have been held around the world in cities including New York, San Francisco, Houston, Washington, D.C., and Beijing, have tended to attract mainly singles; those looking for love at a quiet party are said to be practicing silent dating. The organizers are quick to point out that their events were never intended exclusively for singles, but that seems to be the angle that’s received the most press.

Of course, anyone throwing a private party, of whatever sort and for whatever audience, can choose to follow the same format, and informal quiet parties have been gradually catching on. I think I can safely say that no one has ever had to yell to be heard at one of my parties, but I’d certainly be game to try complete silence. Perhaps one day in the future, when silent parties are the norm, the world will no longer need Silento. I’ll be only too happy to hang up my cape. —Joe Kissell

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More Information about Quiet Parties...

The term quiet parties appeared in Wired’s Jargon Watch in April 2004. You can also find a Quiet Party entry at Word Spy.

The official Quiet Party Web site is at www.QuietParty.com.

Articles about quiet parties include:

• Quiet, please! This is a bar by Olivia Barker in USA TODAY (March 12, 2003)
• Shh, keep your voice down. This is a party. by Elizabeth Armstrong in The Christian Science Monitor (April 22, 2004)
• “Quiet parties” start new trend in dating scene at WIStv.com (September 14, 2005)
• Quiet Party by Stephanie Sellars at New York Press (May 31–Jun 6, 2006)

Related Articles from Interesting Thing of the Day

• Silent Retreats
• The Right-to-Quiet Movement
• Anechoic Chambers
• Labyrinth Walks
• Name Tags

℗ & © 2006, alt concepts. All rights reserved.

London has hundreds of popular tourist spots that attract millions of visitors each year. I admit, I did the whole Big Ben to Westminster Abbey to Buckingham Palace to Tower of London circuit and I enjoyed it. I loved being able to walk out of the hotel and onto a street that contained a 500-year-old house right down the block from a modern tube station and an Indian curry restaurant. But the intricacies of this city, like any city, are often found off the beaten path.

Both my visits to London have included a hike up Highgate Hill and then a walk down the small, winding lane leading to Highgate Cemetery. Many are familiar with London’s abbeys and churchyards, but the real appeal of dead London is Highgate, often referred to as a Victorian Valhalla.

Well, We Can’t Just Put Them on the Streets
Highgate Cemetery was established in 1839. Around this time the church graveyards were becoming quite full, and rather than dump the dead out on the streets, Parliament established seven private cemeteries to be located within London proper. In 1954, when the popularity of burial at Highgate was at its peak, a second part of the cemetery was opened to accommodate all the new “arrivals.” This newer cemetery was coined the East Cemetery, leaving the older side to be called, naturally, the West Cemetery. During the bone yard heyday, both cemeteries had elegant parades of well-dressed mourners following caskets to elaborate tombs and mausoleums. Later, when cremation became legalized, the processions of ornate funerals halted and both cemeteries were maintained less and less. Eventually, in 1975, the West Cemetery was closed altogether and efforts were put into maintaining the East side.

Luckily, a group called “The Friends of Highgate Cemetery” was formed and in 1981 procured both sides. To this day they are responsible for upkeep of the 37-acre sprawl encompassing both cemeteries. However, the West Cemetery, sometimes called a “maintained wilderness,” had become so overgrown that upkeep involved maintaining and restoring the tombs but only clearing the vegetation along the paths and around the nearer graves.

A Garden of Dead People
Highgate does manage to attract a few tourists due to its most famous “resident,” Karl Marx. Marx, along with Michael Faraday and other historical notables, is buried in the East Cemetery. This side, although it exhibits manicured lawns and moderately-kept headstones in some areas, has wooded stretches where the paths disappear into the trees, and headstones are crowded amongst ivy, moss, and each other. It resembles the scene of a ghostly movie; in fact, the cemetery has been the set of a few horror movies. And yet I found, even in this green expanse dedicated to housing dead people, a sense of tranquility, mixed with an overwhelming fascination. This place just exudes mystery.

Even more mysterious is the West Cemetery. While access to the East Cemetery is open to the public (for a modest fee), the West Cemetery has tours by appointment only (for a slightly higher fee). The day I booked my tour it was overcast and gloomy, with an ever-present threat of rain, the perfect backdrop for a necropolis jaunt. The entrance to the West side is a daunting structure, once a chapel with two sides—one for Anglicans and the other for non-Anglicans (or “dissenters”). A tunnel runs under the lane that divides the cemeteries so a body would not have to leave consecrated ground on its way to be buried.

For Your Mental Safety, Please Stay With the Group
Our guide led us through the chapel gate onto the stones of a courtyard. It was eerily quiet here, making it hard to believe that we were still in London. From my vantage point, the cemetery itself was hidden; it was located up a tiny hill behind the chapel and beyond the courtyard. The trees, bushes, and overgrowth cleverly hid nearly all the signs of headstones.

At the top of a stone stairway leading into the cemetery, a path began, and a stretch of graves ambled up either side among the tangles of vines and growth. The variety of graves was amazing. Small markers were ensconced amongst larger markers that bore angels and broken columns, crosses and torches. Many looked as if they would disappear overnight into a fit of ivy and other creeping vegetation.

The path continued through the archway located in the middle of a foreboding stone structure. Flanking the arch were two sets of hulking columns. The guide explained that this was the entrance to Egyptian Avenue, a row of continuous family vaults that form an alley leading up to the Circle of Lebanon. The doors to the vaults were adorned with various funerary symbols signaling the passing of life into death, and as we walked on I got a creepy, tingly feeling.

On other side of Egyptian Avenue was the Circle of Lebanon, another series of continuous vaults with an inner and outer circle. In the outer ring was a columbarium, a place for storing the ashes of those who have been cremated. In the inner ring, a large, sprawling cedar tree was perched in the soil above and between the vaults. The tree itself was here before the cemetery was even built, and its position high above the cemetery contributed to the spooky feeling.

But Wait, There’s More
Located behind the Circle of Lebanon was the tomb of Julius Beers, the largest and most ornate tomb in the entire cemetery. It was built to block the view of London from the terrace of the church directly behind the cemetery that Londoners often would enjoy after Sunday service. Under the terrace was a catacomb of tombs that was closed off to the tour. The vaults themselves could not be seen, and only a gated entrance led into the darkness under the stone. While listening to the tour guide explain the history of the tomb, we rested our backs against the cool stone of the terrace. I had my back to the gate of the entrance just to scare myself a bit. After a few minutes of listening to the guide, a dull thudding noise came from behind the gate. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who heard it, as the other members of the group looked nervously around. As we slid away carefully, we heard the noise again, only louder. Was the guide playing a well-timed prank on us?

Along the eastern edge of the cemetery, more mausoleums and tombs stretched along either side of the path. At one time these tombs were ostentatious displays of wealth, but now they looked worn and frail. Near this part of the cemetery was where the dissenters were buried, in an area apart from the Anglicans.

You Mean There’s Something Out There?
Some subsequent Web searching revealed that, aside from the physical mysteriousness of the cemetery, there were a few stories of the supernatural. The most interesting of these is of the Highgate Vampire. In the late 1960s, following a string of alleged spectral sightings and the accumulation of blood-drained animals in the cemetery, rumors circulated that a vampire was roaming Highgate. Several people claimed to have either encountered or been attacked by the vampire.

Various occult experts undertook rituals to purify the cemetery and rid it of the vampire, but conflicting accounts of these activities and their results led to feuds that persist to this day. Vampire investigations are reportedly ongoing. Needless to say, the entire existence of the Highgate Vampire is controversial, and the Friends of Highgate Cemetery would rather ignore it, in order to keep outsiders from breaking into the cemetery in search of the bloodthirsty apparition.

Vampire or not, Highgate Cemetery is the most interesting cemetery I have ever visited. Its isolation, desolation, and eerie scenery make it akin to a real-life movie. —Jillian Hardee

Guest author Jillian Hardee is a graduate student at West Virginia University studying cognitive neuroscience.

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More Information about Highgate Cemetery...

Interested in writing an article for Interesting Thing of the Day? See our author information page.

This article was featured in History Carnival XXXIV.

To see photographs of Highgate Cemetery and read more about it, see:

• The official Highgate Web site
• City of Shadows: A Gothic Tour of Victorian London (great black-and-white photos of the cemetery)
• Highgate West Cemetery Photo Gallery (more photos, in color)
• Highgate Cemetery photos at Flickr

You can read more about Highgate in Highgate Cemetery: Victorian Valhalla by Felix Barker.

Related Articles from Interesting Thing of the Day

• Paris Catacombs
• Bodie, California
• New Orleans Walking Tours
• New Orleans Cemeteries
• Père-Lachaise Cemetery

℗ & © 2006, alt concepts. All rights reserved.

In the real world, stories of codes leading to buried treasure rarely have tidy endings—and indeed, even separating fact from fiction can be nearly impossible. Such is the case with one of the most intriguing cryptographic puzzles in modern history: a series of encrypted messages dating from the 19th century known as the Beale ciphers. These messages might lead to a hidden stash of gold, silver, and jewels worth tens of millions of dollars, they might be genuine directions to a treasure that no longer exists, they might be a hoax or a joke, or, intriguingly, they might be a misunderstood charity fundraising gimmick. But whether or not the codes lead to treasure, what captivates and infuriates cryptographers is that despite more than a century’s worth of effort by the best minds and machines, the most important parts of the messages remain stubbornly opaque.

Genesis of a Mystery
The story goes approximately like this. A man named Thomas Beale, along with about 30 companions, set out to hunt game in New Mexico in 1817, and unexpectedly came upon a large deposit of gold and silver. After mining the treasure, the group made two trips across the country, in 1819 and 1821, to Bedford County, Virginia, where they buried the gold and silver, along with some jewels they obtained along the way, in a stone-lined vault under 6 feet of soil. The men wanted to return to their mining site to retrieve a third batch of treasure in 1822, but before doing so, took out an insurance policy of sorts in case something should happen to them.

Beale wrote three encrypted messages, which contained, respectively, the exact location of the vault, its contents, and the names of the men in his party and their next of kin. He put these, along with two letters of explanation, in an iron box, which he entrusted to an innkeeper named Robert Morriss. Beale mailed Morriss a third letter from St. Louis some time later saying that if he didn’t return within 10 years, Morriss was to open the box and follow the instructions inside, some of which Morriss would need a key to decipher. That key was to arrive in a fourth letter, which Beale had asked a friend in St. Louis to mail to Morriss in ten years’ time.

Well, Beale and his entire party were never heard from again, and the promised fourth letter never arrived. Morriss waited a full 23 years before opening the box. When he read the enclosed letters, he discovered that Beale wanted him to decipher the secret messages, retrieve the treasure, and divvy it out to the men’s families (keeping a share for himself for his troubles). Without the missing key, though, Morriss couldn’t make sense of the encrypted messages, which consisted of nothing but long lists of numbers. After a further 17 years, and shortly before his death, Morriss passed the box on to a friend, who was able to decipher one of the three messages—the one detailing the treasure’s contents—but not the other two. In 1885, a man named James Ward, acting on behalf of Morriss’s friend, published and sold a 23-page pamphlet (known as The Beale Papers) that included the text of Beale’s letters and encrypted messages, as well as the solution to the deciphered message. Ever since, treasure hunters and code breakers have tried unsuccessfully to decrypt the other two messages and find Beale’s treasure.

By the Book
The message Morriss’s friend successfully deciphered used a cryptographic technique called a book cipher. To make a book cipher, you start with a document—any document, as long as the person writing the message and the person reading it have identical copies—and number all the words consecutively. This becomes your key. Then, to create your ciphertext, you look through your key for each word you want to encode and write down its number.

In this case, the message was encrypted letter-by-letter, with each number in the ciphertext referring to the first letter of the corresponding word in the key. For example, if my key were “Interesting [1] Thing [2] of [3] the [4] Day [5],” the cipher 5 3 1 2 would represent “Do it.” Beale used a version of the Declaration of Independence as the key for his second message, but no one has been able to determine what key was used for the other two—or, in fact, whether they even use the same encryption method.

Doubts and Suspicions
Predictably, after many decades of failed attempts to decipher the two remaining messages, popular opinion began leaning toward the notion that the whole thing had been a hoax, and that the encryption could not be broken because there was no underlying message. Numerous analyses by professional and amateur cryptanalysts over the years have yielded some interesting observations. For example, statistical evidence strongly suggests that the same person who wrote The Beale Papers also wrote Beale’s letters, casting doubt on the authenticity of both. Likewise, an analysis of one of the undeciphered messages using the Declaration of Independence as a key revealed patterns that are mathematically unlikely to have occurred with any other key. In other words, someone may have used the Declaration of Independence to encipher random gibberish.

Furthermore, the story itself contains many suspicious elements. There appear to be no records of any of the thirty men in Beale’s party, and even the existence of Thomas Beale himself is a matter of some uncertainty. His messages contain some historical errors and apparent anachronisms. And there would appear to be no good reason to encrypt each of three messages individually, using separate keys. In all, the story sounds too much like the plot of a cheap novel, which, according to one theory, is exactly what it was.

Some researchers believe that The Beale Papers was written anonymously by a playwright and novelist named John W. Sherman and distributed by Ward—a close relative—not as a hoax or a scam but as a fundraiser. The pamphlet was published shortly after a major fire in Lynchburg, Virginia that killed five men. Ward and Sherman may have cooked it up to help raise money to provide for the bereaved families, with the assumption that purchasers would realize it was a work of fiction. According to this theory, only later, after the story had gained some popularity, was it sold more widely and with less virtuous goals.

Another theory holds that the pamphlet was written by none other than Edgar Allan Poe, to be published posthumously as a sort of final mystery from the great beyond. The text does contain many similarities to Poe’s writings, so it seems likely that if even if Poe did not write it, the author tried deliberately to emulate his style in numerous details.

Take It on Faith
Many people, however, still believe that the messages are just what they appear to be. In 2001, a Web site appeared claiming that a man named Daniel Cole had deciphered the two remaining messages and located the spot where the treasure had been buried, only to find that it was already gone. Mr. Cole apparently died that same year, and although the site shows the supposedly decrypted messages (as well as pictures of the alleged burial spot), the site’s maintainers have not revealed the key (or keys) they used—meaning that no one can verify or disprove their claim.

Whichever of these theories, if any, is correct, the world may never know the truth. Just as an empty hole is no proof that it once contained treasure, statistical analysis of a still-undeciphered message is no proof that it’s meaningless. It might have been a laundry list, a practical joke, or the real thing, but The Beale Papers did contain a cautionary note, which read in part, “Again, never, as I have done, sacrifice your own and your family’s interests to what may prove an illusion…” Those who followed the author’s advice not to waste more time than they could spare on cracking the code may have been the wisest of all. —Joe Kissell

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More Information about The Beale Ciphers...

This article was featured in the 33rd History Carnival and in Carnival of Bad History #6.

There are many excellent sources of general information about the Beale ciphers on the Web, including:

• The Beale Cryptograms at the UnMuseum
• The Beale Ciphers by E.E. Remington at TINA
• Beale ciphers in the ever-helpful Wikipedia

As far as I know, the only book about the Beale ciphers currently in print is The Beale Papers: Lost Legacy by Robert N. Williams.

You can read The Beale Papers in its entirety and draw your own conclusions.

To learn more about various analyses that cast doubt on the authenticity of the ciphers, see:

• The Beale Cipher: A Dissenting Opinion by James J. Gillogly
• The Beale Ciphers Demystified by Ron Gervais
• The sun’ll come up tomorrow at uncreative separatists

The Last Haunting of Edgar Allan Poe by Robert Ward (no relation, as far as I know) proposes that Poe was the likely author of The Beale Papers.

One of the most thorough explorations of the Beale ciphers, and the one that concludes they were written by Sherman as part of a fundraising effort, is Beale Ciphers Analyses, also by Ron Gervais.

The Decoded Cipher site is the one claiming to have cracked the remaining Beale messages, but take it with a grain of salt. Oh, and turn down your computer’s speakers first: every page contains annoying music that you can’t stop.

For those interested in the type of encryption employed by the Beale ciphers, the Wikipedia contains entries on book ciphers and, more generally, homophonic substitution ciphers.

Related Articles from Interesting Thing of the Day

• The Oak Island Mystery
• The Voynich Manuscript
• Dead Media
• The 1715 Spanish Plate Fleet

℗ & © 2006, alt concepts. All rights reserved.

As I’ve mentioned a few times, I’m a bit of a French food snob. Before Morgen and I went to France the first time, we did our homework—reading up on lots of French dishes, particularly regional specialties. The list of things we had to try included authentic bouillabaisse, an elaborate fish stew seasoned with saffron. Unfortunately, what constitutes “authentic” is a matter of strenuous debate among French chefs; there are many, many different recipes. But since the dish was invented in Marseille, a large Mediterranean port city, we decided we’d define “authentic” as “whatever they served us in Marseille.”

Based on what I’d read, I didn’t have much interest in Marseille apart from its food, and our schedule was tight. Our itinerary called for us to take an overnight train there from Paris and then pick up a rental car so that we could tool around Provence for a while. We’d have, at most, a few hours in the city, during which time we had just one task to accomplish. Our plan was to get in, get some bouillabaisse, and get out. After we got our car, we drove to the old part of the city where we’d heard we could find some great restaurants. Since it was still before lunchtime and they weren’t open yet, we walked around for about an hour, studying menus and building up an appetite. In the end, we couldn’t figure out which restaurant was the most authentic-looking, so we picked one at random. The waitress offered us menus, but we didn’t need them—we were on a mission. We dutifully ordered bouillabaisse for two, which turned out to be about five times as much as we could eat. But it was unbelievably good—a truly profound experience that made our visit to the city more than worthwhile. Ever since then, the smell of saffron has taken me back to that restaurant in Marseille.

Flower, Sugar, and Spice
Besides bouillabaisse, some of the other dishes famously flavored with saffron include paella (from Spain) and risotto alla milanese (from Italy). I’ve even had saffron-flavored ice cream at an Indian ice cream shop here in San Francisco. (No kidding.) It was delicious. Saffron is obscenely expensive, but unlike many expensive foods, it has a unique and wondrous flavor that makes it worth every penny.

The expense is a result of the manual labor required to harvest and prepare it. Saffron comes from the saffron crocus, Crocus sativus. Each purple flower has three threadlike orangish-red stigmas, which form part of the plant’s reproductive apparatus. When these are removed by hand and then dried, they become saffron. The stigmas are very, very small, and it takes several hundred to make up a gram of saffron. Depending on their size, it can take as many as 200,000 flowers to make a pound of saffron. Only about 30 tons are produced per year worldwide.

Saffron’s distinctive color has led to its use as a dye; Buddhist monks traditionally wear saffron-colored robes. (It’s also very effective at imparting a yellow or orange color to foods.) Interestingly, though, the chemical compounds that provide the color are not the same ones that provide the aroma and flavor. Saffron has numerous medicinal properties; it’s particularly known as a natural antidepressant. It reportedly has antispasmodic properties, functions as a digestive aid, and reduces intestinal gas—among many other attributes. It can be dangerous if ingested in large quantities, but fortunately, few people can afford to buy enough saffron to make them sick.

Gold Spice
Saffron currently costs about two-thirds as much as gold by weight. That makes saffron the most expensive food product in the world, gram for gram—more expensive than truffles or caviar. And even though you can buy dishes that include flakes of gold leaf, the overall price of the food will still be less than a comparable mass of saffron. OK, I’m sure someone could find some really cheap saffron or outrageously rare caviar and disprove this claim; there are also a few insanely expensive old bottles of wine out there that can cost US$1,000 per swallow. But let’s just say it’s the most expensive food product I’ll ever have in my kitchen.

Fortunately, a little bit goes a long way. A gram of saffron, which you can buy in a little bottle for less than $10, will amount to about a teaspoonful when crumbled—enough to flavor a very large batch of bouillabaisse. The aroma will also permeate your entire house and linger for some time; assuming you like the aroma, that gives it some bonus value as an air freshener. All in all, it’s money well spent for the spice that’s as good as gold. —Joe Kissell

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More Information about Saffron...

Read more about saffron at:

• The epicentre’s Encyclopedia of Spices
• GourmetSleuth.com
• A Cook’s Wares
• The Wikipedia
• Aroma from Carotenoids

You can purchase several varieties of saffron from Amazon.com’s Gourmet Food Store.

An entire book on saffron? You bet—in fact, I’ve found two: Secrets of Saffron: The Vagabond Life of the Worlds Most Seductive Spice by Pat Willard and The Essential Saffron Companion by John Humphries.

Related Articles from Interesting Thing of the Day

• Truffles
• Fleur de Sel
• Edible Gold
• White Tea

℗ & © 2005, alt concepts. All rights reserved.

Time Traveler
The coelacanth is best known for its astonishing “undeadness”; the world’s scientists believed that it had been extinct for about 65 million years until a live specimen turned up in 1938 off the coast of South Africa. Prior to that time, the coelacanth was known only from fossils. Coelacanth fossils have been found that are some 400 million years old, which is considerably older than the dinosaurs; that the coelacanth should survive that long at all is quite surprising. The usual story is that around 65 million years ago, coelacanths disappeared from the fossil record for the simple reason that they stopped inhabiting areas where fossils were likely to form. That’s a rather unsatisfying answer, if you ask me, because it doesn’t explain how these large fish—some weighing as much as 95kg (over 200 lb.) and measuring nearly 2m (over 6 feet) long—should have gone entirely unnoticed by science for more than a century after coelacanth fossils were first identified. In any case, once scientists realized there were some still living, a search began for more. Another group of coelacanths was found off the islands of the Comoros (between Africa and Madagascar) in the early 1950s, and in 1997, a second coelacanth species was discovered near the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.

The coelacanth has a very unusual body structure, with an extra fin at the tail and long, bony, leg-like pectoral and pelvic fins. It was once thought to be a “missing link” between fish and mammals. It is the only living animal with a working intracranial joint, which enables the fish to open its mouth extremely wide so that it can swallow its prey whole. It’s also the only species with a rostral organ, which is sort of like a “nose” that detects the electrical impulses produced by some fish it feeds on. And although, like all fish, its offspring develop in eggs, the coelacanth is ovoviviparous, meaning its eggs are fertilized and carried inside the mother until they hatch, so the young are born alive.

Deep Trouble
As amazing as it is that the coelacanth has managed to survive for hundreds of millions of years, it could very well reach a rather inglorious end. There appear to be several hundred remaining individuals, but they’re seriously endangered—fisherman frequently catch them by mistake, and they often don’t survive even if they’re thrown back in. Although some efforts are underway to protect their territory, it’s unclear how to keep them safe without endangering the fishermen’s livelihood.

But the biggest unanswered question about the coelacanth is why its name isn’t pronounced the way it’s spelled (or vice-versa). I spent years assuming it was either “COAL-a-santh” or “co-EL-a-santh,” but in fact the two c sounds are reversed from what I’d thought and the oe inexplicably makes the “ee” sound: “SEE-la-kanth.” This in spite of the fact that the the name comes from the Greek words koilos (“hollow”) and akantha (“spine”), both of which are unambiguously pronounced with hard k sounds. If the world’s conservationists really want to get people talking about this fish, some simple phonetic or orthographic adjustments would help tremendously. Or better yet: an entirely new name, such as Douglas. —Joe Kissell

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More Information about The Coelacanth...

Thanks to reader John Allie for suggesting today’s topic!

Learn more about the coelacanth at these sites:

• Ancient Creature of the Deep at PBS
• Coelacanth in the Wikipedia
• The Fish Out of Time
• Coelacanth at the Australian Museum Fish Site
• Coelacanth: Fish Out of Time at eSSORTMENT
• New sighting of ‘living fossil’ intrigues scientists by Don Knapp at CNN.com (September 23, 1998)
• Going Twice by Ellen Bartlett in the Boston Globe (December 1, 1997)

Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is great fun; also enjoyable, but in a much more serious way, is Last Chance to See (with Mark Carwardine).

Related Articles from Interesting Thing of the Day

• Spotted Handfish
• The Argentinosaurus
• Passenger Pigeons
• Operation Migration
• The Kakapo Parrot

℗ & © 2005, alt concepts. All rights reserved.

Every once in a while, though, linguists encounter a language that doesn’t seem to fit into any of the families. That is, when you analyze its vocabulary, sentence structure, and other characteristics, there’s no clear proof that it’s historically related to any other living language. It’s as though the language simply appeared out of nowhere thousands of years ago. Such languages are called language isolates, and about 100 of them are known to exist. Although some of these (including Japanese and Korean) have a huge number of speakers, most are spoken by much smaller groups of people—sometimes, but not always, geographically isolated groups. But what’s really surprising is when you find a language isolate in a geographical area where all the other surrounding languages are part of a single family. Such is the case with Euskara, the language of the Basque people in northern Spain and southwestern France.

Basking in the Sounds of Basque
Euskara (sometimes spelled Euskera) is often known simply as “Basque,” though the Basque word for “Basque” is euskara, if you follow. I’ve not seen a single Web site that explains clearly to English-speaking folk how you pronounce this word, so allow me to take a shot at it before we proceed. That first pair of vowels, eu, is a diphthong, much like oi or ow in English. So it’s made by slurring two vowel sounds together: the e sounds roughly like the question word “eh” and the u is like the oo in “food.” But you have to run them together so they sound like a single syllable, which we don’t have in English, “eh-oo.” The r is flapped like a Spanish or Italian r, so it sounds more or less like a d. All together, it’s “[eh-oos] KAH dah” (more or less).

I found a Basque radio station that streams audio over the Internet and listened to people speaking Euskara for a little while. The overall sound of the language was somewhat reminiscent of Spanish—which is to say that if I didn’t actually know any Spanish, I might plausibly have guessed from the sounds, intonation, and cadence, that that’s what I was listening to. However, I may have been hearing speakers whose first language was Spanish, and who therefore were speaking with an accent.

Standing Alone
Euskara’s direct ancestor, an ancient language called Aquitanian, was spoken in western Europe tens of thousands of years ago—far earlier than Latin or any of the other Indo-European languages. Of course, numerous other languages were common back then, too, but for reasons that are not entirely clear, only Euskara survived while all the others died out. The early origins of the Basque people, like their language, are the subject of much debate. Some claim that the Basques came from Atlantis or some other lost civilization, and a few even propose extraterrestrial origins. Serious scholars say that’s all ridiculous, while admitting that they can only say where the language did not originate, which is, apparently, everywhere. Euskara has been compared to virtually every other language, and certain similarities have been noticed to Iberian, Caucasian languages, Etruscan, Sumerian, Semitic languages, and even South American languages—among many others. But most linguists who have studied Euskara in detail believe that these similarities are slight and accidental—that this truly is a unique language with no provable connections at all.

Like all languages, Euskara borrows some terms from other languages, but it has lent relatively few. Several English words that come from French or Spanish are said to have earlier roots in Euskara; these include bizarre, chaparral, and silhouette. The French surname Silhouette, from which we get the English word, was apparently derived from a Basque surname meaning, approximately, “lots of holes.”

Although Euskara is said to be easy to learn, it has some features that are extremely rare in any language. (I know you were counting on me to explain what “ergative-absolutive alignment” is, and I’m sorry to let you down.) Nouns can be modified in hundreds of thousands of ways, but apparently this all makes perfect sense once you get the hang of it.

Euskara has about 600,000 speakers, and is an official language in the region of Spain with a large Basque population—though not in France. There are at least six dialects, but a unified version called Batua is taught in schools and being promoted as the new standard, especially for those learning Euskara as a second language. It’s in no immediate danger of dying out, but after surviving the onslaught of many European languages over the millennia, it’s still threatened by all the usual forces that induce people to prefer a lingua franca to a strictly regional language. But you never know…given enough time, maybe we’ll discover it’s really the galactic standard. —Joe Kissell

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More Information about Euskara...

Thanks to reader Allen Watson for suggesting today’s topic!

To learn more about Euskara, see:

• Basque language in the Wikipedia
• Larry Trask’s Basque Page
• Euskara, the Language of the Basque People
• Frequently Asked Questions I: The Basques, origins and language at the Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada, Reno
• Basque in the Ethnologue

Related Articles from Interesting Thing of the Day

• The Klingon Language Institute
• Pittsburghese
• Bahasa Indonesia
• Esperanto
• Llívia

℗ & © 2005, alt concepts. All rights reserved.

When someone refers to my hometown as “San Fran,” I really bristle. People who live in other parts of the world may think “San Francisco” has too many syllables, but locals don’t ever call it “San Fran.” Ever. And only in an effort to be intentionally gauche or ironic would a resident call it “Frisco.” That’s just wrong, and it immediately identifies anyone who says it as clueless. This judgment goes way, way back. A century and a half ago, by the emperor’s decree, calling the city “Frisco” was a high misdemeanor punishable by a $25 fine.

Today’s interesting “thing” is ostensibly a person, though in fact it’s more of a concept: the notion that someone could declare himself to be an emperor, and—without any force or intimidation—actually get an entire city to go along with the fantasy, at least superficially, for more than 20 years. I am speaking of one of San Francisco’s most colorful historical figures: Joshua A. Norton, a.k.a. His Imperial Majesty Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.

The New Emperor’s Clothes
Joshua Norton was born in England in the early 1800s—sources vary as to the exact year of his birth, but it was somewhere between 1811 and 1819. From 1820 to 1849, he lived with his parents in South Africa. He then moved to the United States, taking up residence in San Francisco. Norton had come to the U.S. with a small fortune, and for several years, he was a successful businessman. Then a major investment turned out poorly, and Norton went bankrupt in 1858. He left the city, but returned the following year—wearing an army uniform with gold-plated epaulets and a funny hat. He presented a piece of paper to the editor of a local newspaper declaring himself to be “Norton I, Emperor of the United States.” The editor found Norton’s claim to be so amusing and bold that he printed the declaration on the front page of the paper as though it were genuine. And, surprisingly enough, the general public’s reaction was apparently “Cool. We have our own emperor.” Norton began striding regally around San Francisco in his uniform as if he really were the nation’s supreme ruler, and the city’s residents indulged him.

From all accounts, Norton, whatever his eccentricities or mental deficiencies, was a kind, affable, and benevolent man who was much loved by almost everyone he encountered. Whether or not he truly believed he had any power or right to rule, the people of San Francisco treated him with great deference and respect. He spent his days patrolling the streets, inspecting sidewalks and cable cars, supervising street repairs, and praising citizens for any good deed he observed. He especially liked to monitor “his” police force to make sure they were serving the city’s needs properly.

Norton was given free meals at restaurants, and in fact, restaurants that served him liked to put up brass plaques bragging that they were an official supplier of the emperor—it was good for business. Theaters reserved prime seats for Norton and his two dogs at every opening, and he was invited to lead parades and participate in various civil ceremonies. A local printer even provided Norton with his very own imperial currency, which merchants accepted as cash. (These notes are worth thousands today at auction.)

On one occasion, a police officer who didn’t appreciate Norton’s status arrested him and attempted to send him to a mental institution. The public outcry was immense. The police chief released Norton with a formal apology, and thereafter, all police officers saluted the emperor when they passed him on the street.

Laying Down the Law
Emperor Norton is perhaps best known for his frequent and audacious decrees, which the local newspapers always printed with great relish. (And when there wasn’t an actual decree, sometimes the newspapers made them up.) An 1860 decree dissolved the United States of America; a few months later, another decree prohibited Congress from meeting in Washington, D.C. In 1869, Norton issued a decree abolishing both the Democratic and Republican parties. Of course, no one ever took these decrees seriously, but this apparently didn’t diminish Norton’s belief in his authority.

Some of the decrees, though, were strictly local—and showed an uncanny degree of foresight. In 1872, Norton decreed that a suspension bridge should be built between Oakland and San Francisco by way of Goat Island (now called Yerba Buena Island). Later that year, another decree demanded that a survey be undertaken to determine whether a bridge or tunnel was the best way to connect San Francisco and Oakland—and the members of the city’s Board of Supervisors were to be arrested for having ignored his earlier decrees. (They weren’t.) But a bridge very much like the one Norton had described was built eventually; the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge opened in 1936. And in 1972, almost exactly 100 years after Norton’s decree, so did a tunnel—it’s used by BART, the Bay Area Rapid Transit system.

Norton’s reign as emperor lasted for 21 years. He died in 1880 of an apparent stroke while walking down the street. Although Norton died penniless, the city gave him a regal burial, and about 30,000 people turned out to watch his funeral procession.

In the years since, some people have argued that Norton really was the emperor, inasmuch as the public (at least in San Francisco) acknowledged that title. And there’s something to be said for that line of thought; after all, the only reason any government is legal or valid is ultimately the general assent of those governed. The United States of America, after all, declared itself into existence once; why shouldn’t an individual do the same?

I, Joe I
Norton did not have a successor, but there’s no reason someone else couldn’t step into the role, even now. Knowing what I do about the follies and failings of San Francisco’s current city government, it seems clear to me that the city—if not the entire country—should once again bring in an emperor to enforce order, fairness, decorum, and maybe a bit of whimsy. Clearly this individual must be someone with intelligence, charm, good humor, and poor fashion sense. As the logical choice, I’d be honored to serve.

And so, citizens of San Francisco, the United States, and/or Mexico, should you choose to accept me as your new emperor by public acclaim, I will humbly and faithfully discharge the duties of the office. I promise to come up with great ideas that can’t possibly be implemented for a century; to issue impressive-sounding, unreasonable, and unenforceable decrees on a regular basis; to dress in a goofy uniform; and to behave in a generally benevolent and weird manner. In other words…pretty much life as usual. I’ll be expecting to receive your tax payments shortly. Oh, and Congress: you’re fired. —Joe Kissell, Emperor

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More Information about Emperor Norton...

Thanks to reader Thom Denholm for suggesting today’s topic!

Read more about Emperor Norton at:

• Joshua A. Norton in the Wikipedia
• Emperor Norton I by Patricia E. Carr
• Who was the “Emperor of San Francisco”? at The Straight Dope
• A little levity about arrogance by Clifford A. Schaffer
• The Madness of Joshua Norton by Joel GAzis-SAx at Tales from Colma
• The page on Joshua A. Norton at the Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco includes a timeline listing many of Norton’s decrees and major activities.

A Rush of Dreamers: Being the Remarkable Story of Joshua Norton Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico by John Cech is actually a novel—or historical fiction, if you will—loosely based on Norton’s life.

Related Articles from Interesting Thing of the Day

• San Francisco’s Terra Infirma
• Winchester Mystery House
• Fortune Cookies
• Rigo Artwork
• The Musée Mécanique
• Performative Verbs
• Sutro Baths
• Alcatraz

℗ & © 2005, alt concepts. All rights reserved.

When I wrote about rock, paper, scissors tournaments, I made a passing reference to my favorite “binary random number generator,” a coin toss. A reader sent me a note saying that wasn’t quite accurate—coin tosses are not truly random. Talk about shaking the foundations of my faith. What insidious conspiracy could be behind this astonishing claim? Or could it simply be that a bunch of statisticians had entirely too much time on their hands?

To Err Is Human
Common sense tells us that a coin toss is random because we have no way to predict its outcome. We don’t know how many times a coin will spin in the air before landing, and we have no way of controlling the number of spins precisely; ergo, the outcome must be random. And casual observations bear this out: if you flip a coin 20 times, it will usually come up heads about half of the time. Random numbers being random, it may not be exactly 10 heads and 10 tails, but the larger your sample size, the closer you’ll get to a 50:50 ratio.

However, it turns out that when it comes to humans tossing coins, it really is a matter of uncertainty and inaccuracy rather than true randomness. Two Stanford University professors, mathematician Joseph Keller and statistician Persi Diaconis, have done extensive research and experimentation regarding coin tosses. Keller showed mathematically that the only way to obtain a truly random coin toss is to make sure it spins around its exact geometrical axis, something no human could do with the necessary precision. And even then, one would have to assume that the number of spins in any given toss was random. After all, coins, like everything else, must obey the laws of physics. Therefore, if you tossed a coin exactly the same way twice—taking into account velocity, angle, air resistance, and other physical variables—it would have to land exactly the same way both times. Diaconis had a machine built that does exactly that, and it can faithfully deliver 100 heads or 100 tails in a row by taking all the human variability out of the picture.

Of course, the effectiveness of the machine is based on the coin’s starting position. Given the number of spins its mechanism creates for every coin toss, the coin will end up on whichever side was up when it started. (Had the machine been designed to use a little more force or a little less, the coin would have ended up on the opposite side each time.) Diaconis wondered if even for humans with our built-in randomizing flaws, there might be a similar bias—a statistical likelihood that a given initial condition will make a given final condition occur more frequently. He used a high-speed camera to capture coin tosses and then performed a geometrical analysis of the images. His conclusion was that for coins flipped and then caught on the back of the hand, there is a bias: they’re slightly more likely to end up on whatever side they started on. But that’s slightly, as in a 51% chance rather than a truly random 50% chance. So for all practical purposes, a coin toss is basically random.

One of the things Diaconis observed, which accounts for part of this bias, is that sometimes coins don’t actually flip all the way over in the air, even though they appear to. A combination of spin and wobble can produce the optical illusion that the coin is flipping when in fact the same side remains up the entire time it’s in the air. If that happens just once out of 100 times, there’s your 51%. But this bias applies only when the coin is caught in midair. If the coin is allowed to hit the ground, other variables come into play, and the likelihood of a different result increases. (So the coin tosses that begin football games, for example, probably do not show any preference for landing on the side that was facing up initially.)

Mint Condition
There’s yet another aspect to the randomness of a coin toss: bias built into a coin itself. We assume that coins are evenly weighted, but some have more raised material on one side than the other, making that side slightly heavier. The usual example is the U.S. penny; the side with Lincoln’s portrait has more metal than the tails side. This difference is too small to change the outcome when the coin is being flipped through the air, but it can be seen if the coin simply falls over on a table. According to Diaconis, a penny spinning on its edge will land tails up 80% of the time. However, another writer, Ivars Peterson at Science News, claimed something a bit different: A penny balanced on its edge (but not spinning) will fall over heads up most of the time, whereas a spinning penny will (as Diaconis suggested) land tails up more often. You know where this is going, of course: I had to try it myself.

I took 10 pennies and balanced them carefully on their edges. I then banged on the table (per Peterson’s instructions) and noted the results. I repeated this procedure nine more times, just to be thorough. This experiment bore out Peterson’s prediction: the coins came up heads 64% of the time (and in two trials, all 10 came up heads). Then I tried spinning all 10 pennies, one at a time. Again, after noting the results, I tried nine more trials with each of the pennies. This time, my results differed dramatically from what both Diaconis and Peterson had predicted: the pennies came up heads 54% of the time. Of course, my table may not have been perfectly flat or perfectly level, and my pennies may have had imperfections too. But then, that’s the whole point of a coin toss: not knowing all those minute variables that may affect the outcome.

Interestingly, in the course of this test, there were four consecutive trials in which the results were five heads, five tails. That was what I found truly amazing: it seemed inconceivable that the results could be perfectly random. What are the chances? Although mathematics may say “close to 100%,” common sense says otherwise. In any case, I’ve learned two valuable and contradictory lessons. First, given human imperfections, coin tosses are random enough for all practical purposes. And second, always call heads. —Joe Kissell

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More Information about Coin Tossing...

Thanks to reader Kevin Lepard for suggesting today’s topic!

Sites that discuss the randomness of coin tosses (particularly the work of Keller and Diaconis) include:

• The Not So Random Coin Toss at NPR
• Lifelong debunker takes on arbiter of neutral choices by Esther Landhuis at Stanford University
• Toss Out the Toss-Up: Bias in heads-or-tails by Erica Klarreich at Science News
• Dynamical Bias in the Coin Toss (PDF) by Diaconis et al.
• A Penny Surprise at Ivars Peterson’s Math Trek (part of Science News Online)
• Coin flipping in the Wikipedia

Related Articles from Interesting Thing of the Day

• Six Degrees of Separation
• The Globe Theatre
• Fortune Cookies
• Micropayment Systems
• Rock Paper Scissors Tournaments

℗ & © 2005, alt concepts. All rights reserved.

Years later, I read a Star Trek novel in which the crew of the Enterprise encountered a race of humanoid beings who breathed a liquid; the book went to great lengths to describe what that experience was like for one of the humans who had to interact with them. Although this fictional liquid was compatible with human lungs, the psychological shock of breathing a liquid was pretty intense. Later still, the very same concept showed up in the 1989 film The Abyss. But hey, that’s all just science fiction, right? Amazingly enough, humans can indeed breathe certain very special liquids.

Fluid Thinking
In order for any fluid to work for human respiration, it has to perform two main functions very well: delivering oxygen to the lungs and removing carbon dioxide. Air obviously does both quite well; so do some other combinations of gases (such as those used in diving). But it’s reasonable to think some liquids may be able to do the same thing. The first experiments involving respiration of a liquid took place in the 1960s. Mice were made to breathe a saline solution with a high concentration of dissolved oxygen. The mice survived for a little while, but although the solution delivered enough oxygen, it was ineffective at removing carbon dioxide; over time, it also caused damage to the lungs.

A few years later, researchers began experimenting with perfluorocarbons, or perfluorinated hydrocarbons—liquids similar to freon that (despite being unfriendly to the ozone layer when they evaporate) are able to dissolve both oxygen and carbon dioxide readily. Initial results were much better than with the oxygenated saline solutions, and mice were able to return to normal gas breathing afterward. Over the next several decades, the formulas for breathable perfluorocarbons (PFCs) have been refined further. The best-known liquid of this kind is called perflubron, also known by the brand name LiquiVent. Perflubron is a clear, oily liquid with twice the density of water. It has the ability to carry more than twice as much oxygen per unit of volume as air. And it’s inert, so it’s unlikely to damage lung tissues. Because it has a very low boiling point, it can be cleared from the lungs quickly and easily by evaporation.

You may be thinking: it’s great that humans can breathe a liquid, but why would anyone want to?

Divers Uses
The primary application of liquid breathing is the medical treatment of certain lung problems. For example, babies born prematurely often have underdeveloped lungs. Because perflubron can carry more oxygen than air, it can help relieve respiratory distress until the lungs are able to function with regular air. But it has also been used for adults with acute respiratory failure, whether due to disease, trauma, burns, or the inhalation of smoke, water, or other toxins. The liquid encourages collapsed alveoli to open, washes out contaminants, and provides better exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide for lungs that are not fully functional. In clinical use, the lungs are usually not filled completely with the liquid; instead, liquid ventilation is usually used in conjunction with conventional gas ventilation.

The other potential use for liquid breathing is in diving. Ordinarily, divers must breathe heavily pressurized gases to prevent their lungs from collapsing deep underwater, but this requires decompression on the way up and carries the risk of nitrogen narcosis and numerous other problems. If the lungs were filled with a liquid instead, most of those problems would simply disappear. This would, in theory, enable divers to reach greater depths, ascend more quickly, and experience somewhat lower risks. Despite what we see in the movies, this technique is not yet ready for prime time, but with advances in equipment, fluid formulas, and training, liquid breathing could someday change the nature of diving dramatically.

For all these amazing benefits, liquid breathing still involves one major difficulty: it’s much harder for human lungs to move liquid in and out than it is to breathe air. Even though perflubron is so much better than air at carrying oxygen and carbon dioxide, that advantage can be lost if you don’t circulate it rapidly enough. Without the use of a mechanical ventilator, this is going to be especially problematic for someone who’s ill, and even a diver in top condition could get very tired of such laborious breathing during a deep and strenuous dive. So I won’t be making plans to live at the bottom of a PFC-filled swimming pool, but it certainly is intriguing to think that a lung full of liquid could prevent me from drowning. —Joe Kissell

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More Information about Breathing Liquid...

This article was featured in Tangled Bank #55.

Thanks to reader Sven Balc for suggesting today’s topic!

Additional sources of information on breathing liquid include:

• Fluid breathing in the Wikipedia
• Liquid Breathing
• Breathing Liquid at About Facts Net
• Liquid Breathing (or artificial gills) at Crawley Divers
• Patients Breathing Liquid in UMC Intensive Care Unit by Kevin Rademacher at the University of Arizona Health Sciences Center
• Partial Liquid Breathing Improves Lung Function, Chances of Survival in Sick Preemies in Science Blog
• Liquid breathing (archives of a discussion list) by Steve Harris, M.D.

The Abyss was directed by James Cameron, who knows a thing or two about diving.

Related Articles from Interesting Thing of the Day

• Oxygen Bars
• Rebreathers
• What’s Left of Patagonia

℗ & © 2005, alt concepts. All rights reserved.

A Little Jab’ll Do Ya
Numerous poisons can—in small enough quantities and under the right conditions—produce beneficial effects. So it’s entirely plausible that the same is true of bee venom, or at least some of its components, even though its main purpose is to protect the bees by inflicting pain. Bee venom therapy is a subset of apitherapy, the medicinal use of any substances created by honeybees—including royal jelly and honey, each of which is already known to have some health benefits. Researchers have discovered a number of very interesting substances in bee venom—most prominently, melittin, a powerful anti-inflammatory agent. This gives some credence to the anecdotal reports that beekeepers who were stung repeatedly experienced a reduction in the pain and swelling of arthritis.

Perhaps the most interesting application of bee venom is in treating the symptoms of MS. Some patients have reported startling improvements in their condition, and although doctors are quick to point out that bee venom is not a cure, patients frequently exhibit increased stability and mobility, as well as reduced spasms. In addition to arthritis and MS, bee venom therapy has also been used with some reported success in treating a wide range of other conditions, including post-herpetic neuralgia, fibromyalgia, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, tendonitis, high blood pressure, scarring, asthma, post-operative pain, and even hearing loss.

No Pain, No Pain Relief
But let’s be clear about this: bee venom therapy, as usually practiced, hurts. The standard procedure is to remove a live bee from its hive (or a bottle) with a pair of tweezers, hold it next to the skin, wait for it to sting, and repeat. (Sometimes ice or a local anesthetic is used to reduce the pain a bit.) Depending on the condition, patients may receive multiple stings at a time, several times a week, for weeks, months, or in some cases, years. The sites of the stings normally turn red, swell up, and become itchy, just as you’d expect. And although some patients find this a minor annoyance compared to the more serious symptoms that are relieved, others have to discontinue the treatment because it’s just too painful.

In order to deal with both the pain and the inconvenience of keeping and handling live bees, bee venom has also been made available in numerous other forms, such as an injectable solution, ointments, capsules, and drops. From what I’ve read, injectable bee venom approaches live stings in potency but also in pain; other forms appear to be somewhat less effective.

Stinging Criticism
Despite the cottage industry that has sprung up around bee venom therapy and reports from a great many satisfied stingees, the medical establishment in the United States considers it an unproven—and possibly dangerous—practice. Most seriously, about 1% of the population has a severe allergic reaction to bee stings that can, in extreme cases, result in death. When bee stings are administered by lay practitioners, the danger is increased, and yet relatively few doctors are willing to perform the procedure.

A few small studies are underway to determine the safety and effectiveness of bee sting therapy for specific conditions. But one of the problems in performing a proper, rigorous, double-blind study is that a placebo must be used in a control group, and it’s difficult to find an inert substance that causes the same pain and skin reaction as bee venom. Still, some of the preliminary test results are encouraging, and everyone’s hope is that the particular substance or substances in bee venom that produce the desirable effects can eventually be isolated and administered without serious pain. In the meantime, people with treatable conditions but a low tolerance for stings must ask themselves: “To bee, or not to bee?” —Joe Kissell

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More Information about Bee Venom Therapy...

Thanks to reader Jon Kover for suggesting today’s topic!

For more information about bee venom therapy, see:

• Bee Venom Therapy by Glenn Rothfeld M.D. at Whole Health New England
• Bee Venom Therapy at the Internet Health Library
• Bee Venom Therapy by Andrew Kochan, M.D.
• Stinging the Pain Away by Charles Downey at WebMD
• Bee Venom May Take the Sting Out of Arthritis by Jennifer Warner at WebMD
• Bee Sting Therapy: Healing from the Hive at the Discovery Channel
• The Buzz About Bee Venom Therapy for MS by Christine Haran at Breakthrough Digest

Sources for bee venom therapy supplies (yes, including live bees):

• Apitronic Services
• Pat Wagner, the Bee Lady
• Bees in a Bottle

Charles Mraz wrote a well-known book about his own experiences with bee venom therapy: Health and the Honeybee (1995). Note, however, that although Mraz used the treatment on himself and others for 60 years, he was not a physician.

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When I saw pictures of a plant called Welwitschia mirabilis (also known by such names as “tree tumbo” or “onion of the desert”) it looked very much like it could have been a previously beautiful specimen that had the misfortune of spending a season or two in my yard. In other words, it looked pretty sick and ugly. But appearances, in this case, are deceiving. This incredibly odd and unattractive plant can thrive in extraordinarily inhospitable conditions—and that’s just the start. The tree tumbo is without a doubt one of the world’s oddest plants.

Good to the Last Drop
The tree tumbo can be found growing naturally in just one place: the Namib Desert, a narrow, sandy strip of land about 1,300km (800 miles) long and up to 150km (100 miles) wide along the coast of Namibia and Angola in southwestern Africa. In this desert, daytime temperatures routinely reach 40°C (about 100°F). Years at a time may pass without any rainfall; the annual average near the coast is something like 25mm (1 inch). However, the area does get a great deal of fog, which provides the equivalent of another 50mm (2 inches) or so of rainfall per year. So the plants and animals that flourish in this desert have adapted to these extreme and unique conditions.

If you were walking through the Namib Desert and came upon a tree tumbo, you’d see what appears to be a large mass of long, narrow, twisted leaves—green toward the center and brown at the ends—radiating from a central stem and lying on the ground. In fact, the plant has just two very broad leaves, but over time (especially with exposure to high winds), they split into shreds that give the appearance of being multiple leaves. The plant never sheds the leaves; the two leaves that appear when the plant sprouts keep growing for the tree tumbo’s entire lifetime. That lifetime is typically hundreds of years; carbon dating has shown some of the larger plants to be more than 2,000 years old. Some botanists consider this to be the world’s longest-living plant.

Unlike typical desert plants, such as succulents—which store as much water as possible in thick stems or leaves—the tree tumbo has very thin leaves that absorb moisture from fog effectively but store almost none. Instead, water is stored in the trunk, most of which is underground. Beneath the trunk, a long taproot extends an additional several meters deep; this serves both to anchor the plant in high winds and to absorb moisture from deep underground.

One of a Kind
Almost everything about the plant makes it very hard to categorize. It has many of the characteristics of tropical plants, even though it lives only in the desert. Its seeds form on cones somewhat like those of a pine tree. That makes the Welwitschia a gymnosperm, but because it’s so unlike other gymnosperms in most respects, it doesn’t neatly fit anywhere in the plant kingdom. So this species is the lone member of a genus, which is in turn the lone member of a family in the Gnetales order of gymnosperms—itself a small and diverse order. Austrian botanist Friedrich Welwitsch is credited with the plant’s discovery and description in 1859, and it therefore bears his name.

Despite the fact that the tree tumbo appears in just one small part of the world, it’s not considered endangered—there are plenty of them. (They can also, with some effort and patience, be cultivated in greenhouses and other environments.) All the same, I think it would be safer for the plants if I stayed far away from the Namib desert. —Joe Kissell

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More Information about Tree Tumbo...

Thanks (again) to reader John Allie for suggesting today’s topic!

To read more about the tree tumbo, see the following sites (most of which feature pictures):

• Welwitschia mirabilis at PlantZAfrica.com
• Welwitschia mirabilis: dwarf trees in the fog at Scenic Hills Nursery
• Images of Dry Tropical Habitat: Welwitschia sp. from Namibia at Mark Olson’s Images of Dry Tropical Habitat
• Welwitschia mirabilis Cultivation by Anna E. Senters
• Welwitschia mirabilis at the University of Connecticut’s Ecology & Evolutionary Biology Conservatory
• Namib desert at National Geographic

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Without a Trace
Tracing over a projected image is a straightforward notion, but if you’ve ever tried it (as I have) you probably discovered that getting good results is not as easy as it sounds. The easy part is getting the proportions right. But lots of things in any image lack well-defined borders, and trying to make sense of textures and the effects of light and shadow while tracing something is quite a complex undertaking. If, instead of tracing, I were painting, the challenge would become even greater, as I’d have to carefully match gradations in color—and as soon as I applied a dark paint to the light surface, the image in that area would virtually disappear. All that to say: projection or no projection, producing a convincingly realistic drawing or painting takes a lot of skill and practice. So if it turned out that one of the great masters from centuries ago really did pull this off, I’d be no less impressed by the final product—and more impressed by the artist’s cleverness.

We know that numerous artists nowadays, and over the past couple of centuries, have employed just such a technique; many of Andy Warhol’s best-known pieces, for instance, were done this way. Prior to the invention of photography, though, the only images that could be projected were live representations of the real world. The technology to do this, the camera obscura, has been known for many centuries—possibly since as far back as the fifth century B.C. If a tiny hole is placed in the wall of a very dark room and the light outside is bright enough, an inverted image of the outside scene is projected onto the wall inside. But the image is usually fairly dim and fuzzy. Two important innovations in camera obscura design occurred in the 16th century: the addition of a lens (which made the image sharper) and a mirror (which could direct the image onto a horizontal surface rather than a wall). And there are a few scattered records from the mid-16th century of artists suggesting the use of a camera obscura as a drawing aid, though the earliest confirmed date of anyone actually doing so is 1603.

An Obscura Artist
It should therefore come as no surprise that an artist might have used such a technique in the 1660s, and that’s just what some people have claimed for more than 100 years about Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer (1632–75). These suggestions first surfaced when people began noticing that the proportions in Vermeer’s paintings didn’t match those of other works from the time, in which the subjects were typically painted at the size the artist perceived them to be. But in Vermeer’s works, objects and people closer to the foreground are larger than those in the background—seemingly in just the proportions that they would be in a photograph—or a tracing from a camera obscura image. Several other clues in the geometry and lighting suggested the same thing, but there was no evidence that Vermeer actually had (or even had heard of) a camera obscura. In addition, since the scenes in question were interiors, presumably any image created by a camera obscura would have been incredibly dim. So for many decades the debate continued.

Then in 2001, architect Philip Steadman described in his book Vermeer’s Mirror detailed research into the geometry of several of Vermeer’s paintings—backed up with photos of painstakingly recreated miniatures of the rooms from the paintings. Steadman’s studies showed that given the dimensions of the room in each scene (which he carefully calculated) and the viewpoint and size of each painting, all are absolutely consistent with an image of the room being projected onto its back wall with a camera obscura. In other words, given not only the uncanny accuracy of the paintings but also the specifics of their perspective, it’s very nearly a mathematical certainty that Vermeer partitioned off a small corner in the back of this room as a camera obscura and painted over the image on a canvas that hung on the wall. (In at least some cases, X-ray evidence shows that although there was no underlying sketch, there was a monochrome image beneath the color paint; this makes sense considering the very dim conditions inside the camera obscura.)

Mirror, Mirror
Although it would be an exaggeration to call Steadman’s arguments uncontroversial, they’re pretty convincing—and, of course, they mainly confirm what a lot of people had suspected all along. But shortly after Vermeer’s Mirror was published, another book hit the shelves that made much broader (and more dubious) claims. Painter David Hockney, in his book Secret Knowledge, claims that European artists used optical aids for painting as early as the beginning of the 15th century. But rather than using a camera obscura, Hockney believes these artists used a concave mirror to project an image onto the canvas; no documentary evidence exists simply because they all chose to keep it a carefully guarded trade secret. Among the many artists on Hockney’s list are Van Eyck, Caravaggio, and Lotto.

Hockney noticed that around the early 1400s, paintings began to show a much more natural representation of light and perspective—that, in some cases, they looked nearly photographic. He was convinced that the level of realism and accuracy they displayed was simply too great to have been done by eye, so he started looking for other explanations. As he went back through history, he noted the use of the camera obscura and other optical aids, and he suspected that the practice may have been much older. He formulated a series of theories about how various works of art over a period of several centuries may have been made by using optics of one kind or another.

Experts in the art world are deeply divided over Hockney’s claims. Because his theories are so wide-ranging, some of them are bound to be accurate to one extent or another. But many critics believe Hockney has gone too far, and a few have spent considerable effort rebutting his theories. David Stork, a physicist and art historian at Stanford University, has published numerous papers debunking various aspects of Hockney’s book. Stork found alternative explanations for many claims of optical aids, pointing out that none of the available evidence requires one to posit the use of optics in the oldest and most controversial works; there are other, simpler explanations. In addition, Stork finds it highly implausible that the artists could have discovered, created, and kept secret such advanced technology for so many years.

Having read lengthy articles about this debate until my eyes blurred, I feel I have enough information to reach my own conclusion. And that conclusion is: it doesn’t matter. What Hockney, Stork, and I agree on is that even if these legendary masters did use optics, that does not in any way constitute “cheating”; they would simply have been tools of the trade. In the end, I think the years invested in this intellectual exercise might have been more profitably spent painting. —Joe Kissell

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More Information about Optical Painters' Aids...

Thanks to reader John Allie for suggesting today’s topic!

This article was featured in Early Modern Carnivalesque.

Vermeer’s Camera: Uncovering the Truth Behind the Masterpieces by Philip Steadman is a detailed account of his work on Vermeer’s paintings. To read more about Philip Steadman’s work, see his extensive Web site. A more compact and readable summary is Vermeer’s Mirror at Grand Illusions.

Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters by David Hockney describes his theories about early Renaissance painters using optical aids. The entire debate on Hockney’s theories is chronicled in some detail at Art & Optics.

Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring” was the subject of a novel by Tracy Chevalier, upon which the 2004 film of the same name (starring Colin Firth and Scarlett Johansson) was based. The book and the movie both incorporate the camera obscura. Prints of the painting are also available.

Other articles on the debate include:

• Reflections on Art by Peter Weiss at Science News Online
• David Hockney’s Secret Knowledge by Paul Lieberman in the New York Times
• Computer analysis says painter Hockney was wrong at EurekAlert

The camera obscura is described in The Magic Mirror of Life and A History of Photography by Robert Leggat.

Both Steadman’s book and Hockney’s book are reviewed in Camera Obscurities by Andreas Teuber at American Scientist Online.

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At the very end, the officer told me to pull over at a certain spot and park the car. And I had a moment of complete panic: the spot he’d indicated was just a few feet from a stop sign, and I remembered from the driver’s manual that it was illegal to park so close. Was this one last test? If I obeyed, I thought, I could be failed for breaking the law. So I hesitated and said, “Isn’t that too close to the stop sign?” The officer became furious and started berating me for my arrogance, reminding me that the manual said, “…unless directed otherwise by a uniformed officer of the law.” Tugging at his sleeve, he ranted, “What does this look like, my pajamas?” He went on and on until I was about ready to shrivel up and die, but in the end, he passed me anyway.

Strictly speaking, my dilemma was not a matter of whether to obey an authority, but rather which authority to obey—the police officer or the written law. Nevertheless, the fundamental conflict was between doing what I thought was right and doing what I was told. As stressful as I found that experience (I still cringe at the thought, more than 20 years later), it pales in comparison to a series of famous (or, perhaps, infamous) experiments performed in the early 1960s. The experiments’ goal was to determine just how far people will stray from their ethical comfort zone in order to obey an authority.

Do As I Say
Stanley Milgram—the same psychologist whose research led to the six degrees of separation notion—was teaching at Yale University several years before he began working on social networks at Harvard. At that time, the world was still coming to grips with the trial of Adolf Eichmann, who was convicted in 1960 of crimes against humanity for his role in the holocaust; his defense had been that he was “just following orders.” Meanwhile, troops were being sent to Vietnam and public anxiety was high about whether, or to what extent, soldiers might again commit atrocities simply because someone in authority told them to do so. Milgram designed a series of psychological experiments to shed some light on this question.

Milgram placed ads in a newspaper offering volunteers $4.50 for an hour of their time if they came to Yale to participate in an experiment about learning and memory. When a volunteer arrived at his scheduled time, he was met by an experimenter and a second volunteer. The experimenter explained that they were conducting a test of how physical punishment (in the form of electric shock) affected one’s ability to learn. One volunteer would be chosen randomly to be the “teacher,” and the other would be the “learner.” The learner was strapped into a chair with electrodes attached to his wrist; the teacher was seated in front of a console with a series of switches that controlled a shock generator. The switches were labeled with voltages ranging from 15 volts to 450 volts and descriptive terms for each (“Slight Shock” at 15v up through “Danger: Severe Shock” at 420v and “XXX” at the last two settings).

The teacher was given a sample shock of 45 volts (mild discomfort) so that he’d know what the learner would feel. Then he was told to read a series of word pairs to the learner; the learner had to memorize which word came second in each pair. Next, the teacher was to read the first word in one of the pairs and wait for the learner to respond with the second word. If the learner got it right, nothing happened; if the learner made a mistake, the teacher was instructed to throw a switch to deliver a 15v shock. With each successive mistake, the teacher was to increase the voltage of the shock by 15v.

As the shocks became more and more severe, the learner would first groan, then complain loudly, then scream in agony, demand to be released, and eventually, stop responding altogether. When a teacher expressed reservations about continuing (as they nearly always did at one point or another), the experimenter insisted that the experiment must be completed and urged the teacher to keep going—assuring him that the shock was merely painful, not harmful. If the teacher became even more distressed, the experimenter reiterated that he would take full responsibility for the outcome and that the teacher would not get in trouble. By the end of the hour-long experiment, a great many of the volunteers were reduced to tears, and virtually all showed signs of considerable distress.

Only after the experiment was finished—when the teacher had administered the maximum possible shock, or flatly refused to comply—would the volunteer be told that the shocks weren’t real; the “learner” was an actor and the “teacher,” who was not chosen randomly after all, was the real test subject.

The Shocking Truth
The initial experiment showed something Milgram wasn’t expecting: despite their reservations, anxiety, and protests, 65% of the subjects administered the maximum possible shock of 450v, and none of them dropped out before 300v. Milgram then performed numerous variations on the experiment with hundreds of test subjects. These further experiments confirmed his original findings and also revealed some interesting details. For example, the subjects were less likely to deliver strong shocks when they were nearer to the “learner” or when the “experimenter” was not physically in the room (giving instructions by telephone). Subjects were more likely to deliver strong shocks if an actor posing as a second volunteer provided encouragement; conversely, if other “volunteers” disobeyed, so would the test subject. Perhaps most tellingly, though, when the subjects were given the freedom to choose shocks of any intensity, they nearly always chose the lowest settings (though a couple of people did administer the strongest shocks).

Although the “learners” weren’t shocked, other psychologists were—not because of Milgram’s results, but because of his methodology. His peers criticized him harshly for years afterward for causing such severe stress to his test subjects. Nevertheless, other researchers around the world have conducted comparable tests in the decades since, invariably yielding similar results to the ones Milgram obtained. But while academics debated the ethics of traumatizing volunteers, the public latched onto the troubling implications of Milgram’s findings. Basically, in a huge majority of cases, humans will obey an authority figure (though often under duress)—even if they firmly believe that doing so means causing someone else serious harm.

And yet, despite the fact that this principle has become common knowledge, most people (whether in a corporate environment, the military, or anywhere else) still believe that “I’m just doing my job” or “I’m just following orders” are valid excuses for inexcusable behavior. I’m certainly no anarchist, but I have to wonder how many injuries, deaths, acts of terrorism, and even wars might have been prevented had their perpetrators found the courage to choose humanity over following the voice of authority. —Joe Kissell

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More Information about The Milgram Obedience Experiments...

Thanks to reader Carole Walker for suggesting today’s topic!

Milgram described his experiments in his book Obedience to Authority. You can read an excerpt, “The Perils of Obedience,” which appeared in Harper’s Magazine in 1974.

Other discussions of Milgram’s experiments include:

• Obedience in Retrospect by Alan C. Elms
• Resisting Authority: A Personal Account of the Milgram Obedience Experiments by Joseph Dimow in Jewish Currents
• Milgram experiment in the Wikipedia

Thomas Blass’s biography of Milgram is called The Man Who Shocked the World. You can read a summary by Blass in Psychology Today. Blass also maintains the Web site StanleyMilgram.com.

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Although this sort of thinking may be an extreme example, it’s indicative of a broader and older cultural trend, which some people refer to as the “mind-body split.” Whether you trace this trend back to Cartesian dualism, the early days of Christianity, or some other source, it amounts to a belief that the body is somehow an ontologically separate entity from the mind (or “soul,” or “spirit”). Perhaps the two are even in competition or conflict with each other. Even if, as adults, we recognize that by implicitly accepting this split we’ve become disintegrated and unbalanced, it’s difficult to reprogram ourselves to recover that sense of being a single, unified whole. A practice called InterPlay exists to encourage that process by helping people to rediscover and express one of their most basic, primal needs: play.

Play Time
Children, of course, have no trouble playing, and kids seem to engage in play with their whole beings—what InterPlayers refer to as “mindful presence.” That, in a nutshell, is what InterPlay seeks to restore to adults who have lost all sense of how easy it is to have fun. As we grow older, we tend to take ourselves more and more seriously. Although that is useful in some respects, InterPlay is a reminder that we never outgrow the need for play.

What does InterPlay mean by “play”? Not the things adults usually mean—sports, board games, gambling, and so on. In a sense, play can be anything that’s enjoyable, but some of the specific activities that make up InterPlay are deep breathing, telling stories, singing, stillness, hand movements, and yes, dancing—all done with a relaxed (and often goofy) attitude. InterPlayers realize that the people who most need to learn how to play sometimes have mental blocks about the very idea of dance, or perhaps even resistance to more basic notions like movement or touch. So their practices are carefully designed to put participants at ease and ensure that everyone feels safe as they learn gradually to “let go.” You may think you’re making a fool of yourself, but so is everyone else; the freedom for each person to be equally silly without judgments or comparisons is part of InterPlay’s basic philosophy.

InterPlayers learn to identify judgments they may have unconsciously made about themselves and release them. Since other participants are not judging you, you learn to silence your inner critic as well. So taking part in InterPlay activities is something like a cross between group therapy and improv comedy. InterPlay teaches participants to become more spontaneous and creative, to better handle stress, change, and uncertainty, and to be more effective collaborators.

Playground as Church
Although many InterPlayers become involved out of a desire to free themselves of certain religious baggage, the practice itself has no religious (or anti-religious) agenda. Instead, it espouses the viewpoint that spirituality is a subset of play, and that to the extent we can discover our true selves, we become better equipped to experience deeper levels of reality. Those who feel a spiritual path must be one of great seriousness and asceticism are challenged to think about spirituality in a more relaxed, light-hearted way.

InterPlay creators Cynthia Winton-Henry and Phil Porter met while attending seminary in Berkeley, California in the late 1970s. They have collaborated ever since. After developing the basic philosophy of InterPlay, they formed a nonprofit organization called Body Wisdom to provide a structure for teaching InterPlay and training other leaders. InterPlay groups have sprung up all over the world; the activities are also taught in such diverse settings as corporations, churches, hospitals, and prisons. Body Wisdom’s new headquarters, called InterPlayce, opened in downtown Oakland, California in 2004.

I have several friends who practice InterPlay, including one who’s on Body Wisdom’s board of directors. Although I myself am not an InterPlayer, I’ve noticed that simply by interacting with people who are, I’ve gotten sucked into the wonderful vortex of playfulness that they embody. And that’s exactly what InterPlay is all about: spreading the benign contagion of play. —Joe Kissell

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More Information about InterPlay...

The official InterPlay Web site is InterPlay.org.

InterPlay’s two founders have each written books about the program and its insights. See What The Body Wants by Cynthia Winton-Henry (2004) and Having It All: Body, Mind, Heart & Spirit Together Again at Last by Phil Porter (1997).

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