The Hanging Gardens

Am currently toiling in the Purgatory of secondary applications. Meanwhile, the world continues to be bizarre and amazing.

Fanged frog that eats birds, 162 other new species found in Mekong. A gecko with leopard-like spots on its body and a fanged frog that eats birds are among 163 new species discovered last year in the Mekong River region of Southeast Asia, an environmental group said Friday.

Killer rabbit attacks snakes. For three weeks Armando Del Manso believed his dog was responsible for the dead snakes showing up with teeth marks all over them on his East Barron property’s lawn each morning. But it turns out it was a pair of rampaging rabbits killing the snakes.

1 Million Spiders Make Golden Silk for Rare Cloth. A rare textile made from the silk of more than a million wild spiders goes on display today at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

‘Coywolf’ hybrids fill open evolutionary niche in northeast U.S. New DNA evidence reveals that coyotes have bred with wolves in the the northeastern United States, turning mice-eating coyotes into much larger animals with a hunger for big prey, such as deer. (Though I agree with Geekologie that "wolfoties" would have been the better name.)

OH MY STARS, INTERNET, YOU WILL NOT EVEN BELIEVE THIS.

So I was doing more literature review for my senior project. And I found one EEG study that was fairly pertinent to my topic, but hey, why does the first author's surname look so familiar...

Remember that post a couple weeks back about Mr. Cult Leader the FYSEM professor? Raise your hand if you know where I'm going with this.

That's right, my tumultuous past is dogging me.

I said a rude word very loudly. Then I started laughing, because how else are you supposed to react to that?

This is beyond "unlikely" and into "implausible," because this guy was principally an author of literature, not a science-y person. And the article was published the year he taught my class, so it was probably submitted before he came to Bard. The second author looks like it might have been his conductor ex-wife (I TOLD YOU HE OVERSHARED), so... so...

I don't even know. I'm kind of stuck between hilarity and horror.

WELL PLAYED, UNIVERSE, WELL PLAYED INDEED.

Canadian scientist aims to turn chickens into dinosaurs. Did he not see how Jurassic Park ended?

ETA: Better article on it here.

Seeing is believing, even where your own actions are concerned. Viewing fake-video evidence, or simply being told that video evidence exists, can lead people to believe they committed an act they never did. Participants completed a computerized gambling task, and when they returned later the same day, the researchers falsely accused them of cheating on the task. 87% signed a confession stating that they had taken money from the "bank" on the first request.

My first year of college I fell, almost by accident, into the First Year Seminar taught by one of the most interesting people I have ever met. I have hard time articulating just what I mean by "interesting," because I've considered and discarded "pitiable" and "terrifying" as both true but not sufficient. An author with a long and checkered history of odd jobs, from tea taster to corporate shark, he had the sort of charisma that had the entire class thronging around him. He arranged for extra reading and extra meetings outside of class that went on far into the night, and nobody complained, or if they did I never noticed. He started up an e-mail group so the students in his two courses could debate, ask questions, and post those essays he judged worthy. I fell behind on reading the constant back-and-forth that flooded into my inbox pretty quickly; I had four other classes, plus the Conservatory to worry about. Instead, I saved all of the e-mails in a folder titled "The Burning Gods", promising myself I'd read them when I had time. I don't remember why I called it that, besides that I liked the phrase.

Second semester, the FYSEM schedule he offered didn't mesh with some of my mandatory courses. We kept in touch. For reasons I've never really understood, he had chosen me first semester, along with a handful of others. We were the elect, invited over to his house for debates, offered mentorship and the assurance that we were, as his oft-repeated refrain went, "brilliant." I can't speak for the others, but I had some nasty self esteem issues my first couple years. Hearing that yes, I was intelligent, I was a special, special snowflake, I had something worthwhile to offer the world, and getting that validation from a respected authority figure who cultivated the wise and farsighted aura of a guru or a cult leader was amazing. And I really cannot stress his charisma enough. In person he had the sort of magnetic pull that made everything he said seem reasonable, even when you realized it was a load of bull once you'd left his sphere of influence. I ended up talking to one of the other students who'd taken his course and came to the conclusion that it had taken us nearly a year to look back on that class with enough objectivity to say "Wow. The way he positioned us as his little disciples was kind of creepy."

Anyway. Trouble came to Paradise in the second semester. I got it all second hand, at first only from the professor, eventually from some of the students he'd alienated. He told me about the bitter divide in his class over the extra reading he'd assigned, about the vitriolic arguments that devolved in ad hominem attacks, about how shocked and upset he was over the immaturity of his 18 year old students. Oh, and about the student who confessed her love to him and how he invited her out to watch the sun rise. In retrospect, I have no idea how much was true, how much was a lie, and how much he honestly thought was true but did not correspond to reality as most people recognize it. The entire fiasco came to a peak at the end of the second year, when he posted publicly about a relationship he disapproved of between two of his elect. They split off and sent a scathing critique of his teaching style to the administration.

Yes, this is all very dramatic. We were first year college students out on our own for the first time. Rather than get drunk and party, we'd elected to get sucked into a culty tempest in a teapot. I don't know what the professor's excuse was for aiding, abetting, and instigating.

I let myself fall out of contact with him. The gaps between our e-mails grew longer, the e-mails themselves shorter and more perfunctory. With distance, I came to see the extent of his neediness, his ego and arrogance, the way he'd manipulated his students to make himself the center of his own little universe.

But I've let the two hundred e-mails in The Burning Gods lie in my inbox for the past four years, unwilling to throw them out just because I'd become disillusioned. I always intended to read them eventually, hopefully with the understanding that an extra few years of life has given me and sympathy for all of those passionate, brilliant kids talking about philosophy like they were the first ones to ever really think about it. I've glanced through a couple of them and they're about what you'd expect: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Today I hit delete.

I haven't been writing down my dreams regularly, so I don't remember all the details as clearly as I should, but the one last night started off neat and then got creepy.

It was set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Fairly standard fare, from what I can remember: small enclaves and tribes of humans fending for themselves as best as they could, complete breakdown of society, everything was grungy and gritty in the best Hollywood tradition. What stands out is when I stumbled across a warehouse of ancient engines predating the breakdown. Calling it a warehouse doesn't do justice to the size of the place; it was big enough to have its own horizon, and filled entirely with rectangular blocks arrayed in orderly rows like library shelves. Dust covered everything in a thick, muffling layer, and the only light was wan and sourceless. The blocks stretched up to a ceiling so high it faded into the gloom pervading the entire place. I knew instinctively that they were engines, though dream-me seemed to think that they did things as well as powered them. Each one was covered with an intricate filigree of designs darker than the concrete-grey of their outer shells, something like a cross between complex equations and fractals, that might have served as a manual or a description of what each one did. Brightly colored graffiti covered some of the designs, signatures, enigmatic epigrams, and sometimes just swaths of color, as though the vandal had purposely tried to obscure the symbols beneath.

I wandered in the narrow corridors between the engines - I think I'd fled there to escape one of the roving gangs, since the warehouse was forbidden and/or holy territory - until I heard the sound of clanks and swearing. Following the sounds to the source led me to a tiny woman dressed in mechanic's overalls, covered in grease and dust. Her hair was cropped short and stuck up in haphazard hedgehog spikes with all of the engine oil and dirt in it. She had removed the front panel from one of the engines to reveal an intricate arrangement of gears, springs, what looked like oversized circuitboards, and and wires, which looked like the source of the clanks and the reason for her profanity. Most of it looked rusted or covered in cobwebs. She switched from glaring at it to glaring at me when I came up to ask her what she was doing.

Self-evidently, she was trying to fix the engines. She'd theorized that the wasteland had formed when they stopped doing their job, whatever it was, and she wanted to restore them and theoretically the world. I offered to help and at the sound of my voice, the machine's workings started to move. They were horribly out of repair, so they did so with much rattling and grinding, but they stopped the moment I shut up. It's hard to say who was more startled, her or me. The mechanic rounded on me irritably, feeling that I'd stolen the glory of fixing the machines from her. She'd worked on them for years and never figured out what powered them, much less made them move, and now I'd come along and gotten a reaction out of them without even knowing what I was doing. I could help her fix them, she said at last. Emphasis on 'help'.

Stuff happened, and I'm sure it must have been neat, because I woke up with the sense that I was either the reincarnated engineer who'd designed the machines, his/her descendant, or the immortal engineer myself, having wiped my memory of the past who-knows-how-long for some obscure reason. The creepy part came when I noticed the first two fingers of my left hand getting stiff and numb. This was probably because I was sleeping in a funny position, but in the dream, this continued for weeks while I worked on the engines. They grew unusable and I finally peeled the skin off my index finger. It came away painlessly, a bit like old snakeskin. Beneath it, the muscles of my finger were desiccated and half-translucent. I examined it more closely and found small insects burrowed into the pad. The dream dumped the knowledge that they were parasites into my head. They were bright orange and tear-drop shaped, with mandibles like a wolf spider and a cluster of bright black eyes. I squeezed them out. The adults were tiny - four or five of them had fit in the tip of my finger - and the grubs were little more than orange dots. They fell out of their holes easily and when I looked away and then back, the skin had regenerated and I had feeling in my index finger again. My middle finger had been growing numb more slowly than my index. Now that I knew what was causing it, I took a razorblade, braced myself, and cut into the tip. I saw a flash of orange beneath, and I squeezed. The cut wasn't quite big enough for the parasite to be pushed out. The pain wasn't terrible - the finger was mostly numb, after all - it felt a bit like lancing a blister.

I woke up before I could debug my middle finger. Strangely, neither skinning my finger nor the sight of the parasites who'd burrowed into it bothered me much in the dream. It was more of an annoyance that kept me from using that hand effectively, and after all, everything regenerated once I'd pushed the parasites out. I only started getting the heeby-jeebies once I woke up and remembered them.

This is the third horrible dream I've had where disgusting things are growing on/in/eating my flesh. Thanks, subconscious. Thanks lots.