Ill Esoterics: "An Earful"

By THOM HAWKINS

A few weeks ago, I pulled a pea-sized gob of black earwax from my left ear, got curious, and wanted to know more.

It was one of those situations where I always assumed that my experience was similar to that of others because we don't talk about earwax in polite company. After I found out that earwax, known scientifically as cerumen, comes in different varieties, I decided to follow up with friends and co-workers. According to several sources, including this fascinating article on Japanese ear-picking salons, "wet earwax is most common in those of European and African descent, while East Asians have dry, powdery earwax." While hardly a statistically valid sample, amongst those I asked, the two European (Italian and Slavic) and one African descendant had dry, flaky earwax, while the East Asian's was "golden and waxy." One woman I interviewed claimed not to have earwax, which sounds like a way to distinguish human from alien or cyborg.

My doctor friend (the golden and waxy East Asian) couldn't recall learning anything about cerumen in med school, but from his personal experience had seen it vary from "flaky and white to dark brown and caked." He also pointed out that race would be a factor in the appearance because some of the wax is sloughed skin, so the skin pigment contributes, at least to the color of the wax.

The wax is produced in the outer third of the canal, and the motion of the jaw while chewing shifts the wax gradually outward, containing dust or debris that has entered the canal, and pushing it outward. The use of blunt objects to clean the ear, without the use of a scope, could push the cerumen further into the canal, impacting or blocking the ear drum. Not only is earwax migratory, but because earwax type is genetic, earwax can be used as a genetic marker to determine the relationship between migratory peoples.

I've always heard that you should never stick anything in your ear that's smaller than your elbow. Myself, I've always used pen caps--they're the perfect length to pick through the waxy mounds without venturing beyond forbidden canal territory. I've also poured hydrogen peroxide in my ears, something I once saw my drummer friend's girlfriend do to clean his ears. My sister used to work at a health food store, which sold ear candles. I have not tried these because the principles behind their operation never seemed scientifically valid--and in fact, it is disputed by any reputable source, and often condemned as dangerous. However, while we debate even sticking bits of cotton fluff on paper sticks in our ears, the Japanese once again have an ear-refutable technological advantage:

Before you get the idea that this trend emerged with the rich, ear cleaning is an Asian tradition, originally performed by a wife for her husband, then outsourced to street-side "professionals" before making a clinical leap. There are even reports of a club in Tokyo where a man can get two female otolaryngologists to clean his canals simultaneously. Okay, I made that up. I think.

ILL ESOTERICS: "Puzzle Space"

By THOM HAWKINS

Take a grid of nine dots:

Connect all nine dots using no more than four contiguous (i.e., without lifting pen from paper) straight lines.

Most have trouble solving this puzzle upon first encounter. There solution depends upon the identification and rejection of a false assumption. The assumption itself is caused by a perception that the problem space is limited to the boundary indicated by the dots; therefore, the solution literally involves thinking outside of the box. (The usual solution uses four lines. There is also a solution that involves rejecting the assumption that a point drawn on paper is only a representation of a zero-dimensional location, rather than a two-dimensional shape the actual height and width of the spot on the paper. Further solutions reject the assumption of Euclidean geometry, or that the line itself is one-dimensional.)

In the puzzle, we can learn from a thorough examination of the puzzle space and the rules. For example, the number of lines that can be drawn through one dot and one dot only is infinite. There are only two ways (though this can be applied multiple places within the puzzle) that a line can connect two and only two dots (one up, one over; one up, two over). There are also only two ways (though, again, this can be applied multiple places within the puzzle) that a line can connect three and only three dots (one over, one over; one up, one over, one up, one over).

In addition, the lines must connect at their ends to solve the problem, because, based on the rules (i.e., not lifting the pencil), one would have to waste a line to backtrack to the middle of a previously drawn line. Any solution involving lines connecting only at 90-degree angles can also be quickly dismissed through trial and error, because so few options exist.

"Just as a solution is sensitive to the proper isolation of the problem, it is also sensitive to proper delimitation (constraints). In general, the more broadly the problem can be stated, the more room is available for conceptualization. A request for the design of a better door will probably result in a rectangular slab with hinges and a handle. Is that what is wanted, or is the problem really a better way to get through a wall?" -James L. Adams, Conceptual Blockbusting

A few factors play into our puzzle space constraint, most notably Gestalt principles of grouping:

• The principle of closure: It is part of our perceptive mechanism to create order from disorder—thus when we see a group of dots, we connect them into shapes—e.g., astronomical constellations and connect-the-dot pictures. Therefore, when we implicitly connect the outer dots into a box, a barrier to extra-dot perception. There is, in effect, an illusory contour enclosing the box.
  
  
• The principle of proximity: The space surrounding the nine dots makes the group of dots proximate to each other. In addition, the space surrounding the dots is not defined either geometrically, or linguistically. It is, thus, a puzzle void. One of the test subjects noted that a hint could be provided by drawing a box around the nine dots to include the space surrounding, thus defining it as part of the puzzle space and affecting the perception of proximity.
  
  
• The principle of similarity: The dots are all the same size and shape, lending to their perception as a closed group.
  

Another puzzle that relies on a false perceptual assumption is this one:

How can the same smaller shapes rearranged leave a gap in the bottom version of the larger shape?

The false assumption here is one of perceptual approximation. A puzzler will measure the base and side of what appears to be a right triangle, and confirm that they are equal in the top and bottom shapes. Of course, as we know from the Pythagorean theorem, in a right triangle, the square of the hypotenuse will be equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. But the puzzler's mistake is that they've assumed based on the right angle that this is a right triangle—but it isn't a triangle, because the false hypotenuse isn't a straight line. When first presented with this problem, I was working with a group of engineers. When I pointed out that the "hypotenuse" in the two shapes was intersecting the grid at different points, and therefore, wasn't a straight line, they dismissed this as a poor rendering of a valid problem. In fact, I was correct, because the two triangle-like shapes in the larger shapes are right triangles, but they have different slopes; therefore, the first of the two conglomerate shapes is actually a polygon, cleverly disguised as a right triangle.

In both cases, the problem is how one can identify, and therefore validate or invalidate, these hidden assumptions. What is the process of reconciliation that takes place?

The idea that assumptions, whether valid or not, occlude our problem-solving abilities means that we must develop methods of analysis for making implicit assumptions explicit so that they can be evaluated.

When I was in elementary school, a teacher posed a problem—make ten with five nines. The answer she intended was some version of 9 / 9 + 9 - 9 + 9 = 10. I was the first to raise my hand. I drew my solution on the blackboard:

Is this answer "right"? It depends on the use. A problem without a purpose leads to a solution without a use.

ILL ESOTERICS: From Procreation to Text Generation

By THOM HAWKINS

In 1202, Leonardo Pisano (~1170-1240, aka Fibonacci) wrote Liber Abaci, a Book of Calculations that included a math problem related to fornicating rabbits. If you start with a pair of rabbits—one male and one female—who have just been born, and assuming they reach sexual maturity after one month and have a gestation period of one month, how will this population of rabbits grow? At the start of the experiment, we have one pair. After one month, they are sexually mature, and do what bunnies that age do. A month later, the female gives birth to a litter of two—again, one male, and one female. (Okay, a few more assumptions—each time a rabbit gives birth, the litter will consist of one male and one female, both of whom survive and mate; yes, yes, incest and the gene pool and all that—but that's how you get freaks like the Easter Bunny, Bunnicula, and the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog.) So far, we have one pair at the beginning, still one pair after the first month, and two after two months. For the third month, the first couple has another litter, but the second couple is just reaching sexual maturity and doing the horizontal bunny hop. And so on—1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, etc. Oh yeah, one more assumption—rabbits never die. This series of numbers, not invented or discovered by Fibonacci, but merely popularized in his math text has, over the centuries, taken on cultural proportions (The Da Vinci Code, Fibonacci trading), although the numbers themselves are quite arbitrary and reproductively unrealistic. Leonardo's lagomorphs are so reliable that the series itself is often misinterpreted as each number being the sum of the two previous numbers, an assessment of sexual maturity notwithstanding. The Shao sequence takes two whole numbers and finds the difference between them, placing that number on each side of the initial pair, and working outward; for example, given a,b: a-b, a, b, a-b; then (a-b) - a, a-b, a, b, a-b, (a-b) - b, etc. In numbers, given 2,3: 1, 2, 3, 1; then 1, 2, 3, 2, 1, etc. No matter which two whole numbers are used at the start, the series will eventually begin repeating 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, etc., demonstrating that given a random set, if a transformation is applied consistently, order will result. Both the Fibonacci sequence and the Shao sequence involve two elements: a rule (or set of rules) and a seed. Both sequences are also examples of a Markov chain. Named for Russian mathematician Andrey Markov (1856-1922), a Markov chain is a sequence that depends only on the present state, and not on any past state. That is, by examining the present state and any applicable rules, one can produce the next state without examining the history of the sequence. I first encountered the concept in Nicholson Baker's Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper: "As director of MIT's Operations Research Center, [Philip Morse] had the idea of applying OR's mathematical methods to the workings of MIT's library; out of that grew Morse's thickly mathematical treatise, Library Effectiveness (1968), which uses a technique called Markov analysis to determine whether a book of a particular age and number of previous circulations is likely to remain useful; in order to gather detailed circulation statistics, Morse wanted to computerize the library. The modern library, he felt, 'cannot now be operated as though it were a passive repository for printed material.'" There is a bit of a disconnect in this passage, because it refers to the book's previous circulation, which is an examination of the past. However, this should be read now with reference to recommendation engines, which can determine selections not only on past purchases of the user in question, but on purchases made by all users in conjunction with the current book. This collective knowledge is referred to as a corpus, and it provides the analytical basis for Markov analysis. The letter E is the most common in the English language. This fact is based on analysis of any significantly sized English-language corpus. Each letter has a relative frequency of appearance, as analyzed by Claude Shannon in his seminal paper, A Mathematical Theory of Communication (pdf). This is the basis for the letter points in Scrabble—the more frequent the letter is used in English, the lower the point value. In addition, by analyzing a corpus, one can also determine how frequently a letter appears in context with other letters. By increasing the context, one can generate increasingly intelligible text. Appelicontes of Teos, attempting to reconstruct the worm-eaten works of Aristotle, aroused ire by filling in the gap based on his own scholarly judgment. Given a large enough corpus of Aristotle's work, the gaps could have at least been informed, if not written by, Aristotle himself (Basbanes, A Gentle Madness, pp. 65-66). William Henry Ireland, forging the papers, and ultimately an entire play by Shakespeare, could have proven more difficult to detect by reverse engineering some of the very techniques used to identify fraudulent works (Basbanes, A Gentle Madness, p. 66). In fact, the composer David Cope has done this, by examining the corpuses of Mozart and Bach to generate "new works" by these composers. Not bad for animal husbandry.

ILL ESOTERICS: A Fingernail Sale

By THOM HAWKINS

A few weeks ago, my wife, noticing that I had not trimmed my toenails in some time, suggested that I sell them to Macy’s for rich, old ladies to use.

“What?!”

“That’s what I used to do in middle school to make spending money, except that was fingernails, not toenails.”

“What?!”

She told me that she sold her fingernails to Macy’s—not just shreds and clippings, but inch-long segments, trimmed off at her fingertips by qualified Macy’s personnel. Macy’s would pay her a pittance for these keratin-based cleavages, and shape and re-sell the nails to those who could not or would not grow their own.

So there were these women, I imagined them sipping champagne at cocktail parties, wearing fur coats, and, more absurdly, a twelve-year-old’s fingernails.

The fingernail.

Fingernails grow at a rate of approximately 0.1mm per day, four times faster than toenails, although the exact rate of growth depends on numerous factors, such as nutrition, the age and sex of the individual and the time of year. Fingernails grow faster on young people, on males, and in the summer.

See? Look closely.

Oh wait, look at this one—on a right-handed person, the fingernails on the right hand grow faster.

"For three days after death, hair and
fingernails continue to grow, but phone calls taper off." - Johnny Carson

Fingernails do not continue to grow after death—that is an illusion caused by the dehydration of the body after death—the skin pulls back, revealing more nail.

In their 1984 book, ‘Rumor!’, Hal Morgan and Kerry Tucker debunked a 1960s urban legend that Revlon was paying ten dollars for nails over an inch long. My wife notes that she was paid nowhere near ten dollars a nail. Similarly, the Urban Legends website claims that the fingernail sale rumor has been debunked. Has it now? Well, my wife debunks their debunking. So there.

Body brokers, often working on the grey market fringes of funeral parlors, crematoria, and willed-body programs, 'disarticulate' acquired bodies and sell their parts to medical equipment corporations, pharmaceutical companies, and surgery training programs.

One such body broker, Allen Tyler, sold surplus body parts from the University of Texas Medical Branch's willed-body program. Over a period of three years, Tyler sold more than a thousand body parts belonging to the university—heads, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes—and earned upwards of $200,000, according to the FBI. Between November 1999 and August 2001, from fingernails and toenails alone he made at least $18,210. Tyler received $4,005 in one such transaction—payment for 232 fingernails and 35 toenails at $15 each, according to Tyler's records.

After reading that, the title "Department of Human Resources" gives me the creeps.

Macy's neglected to respond to my queries regarding history and prices of their fingernail market, and my wife suggested that the activity may not have been sanctioned by corporate Macy's policy, but may have represented a shady local underground.

So there is a supply, but where is the market for human fingernails? An Observer article from November 2002, in discussing the human body parts trade in London, references the use of fingernails and toenails in making voodoo poisons. In a related story, I recall my mother cursing my father when he forced her, as his new bride, to clip his toenails. Well, in all fairness, although toenails were not specifically cited in their marriage vows, she did promise to love, honor, and obey. Had my mother been familiar with voodoo practices, no doubt she would have subsequently used my father’s toenails as an active ingredient while making the meatloaf he forced her to cook.

(Interesting note: You can donate your hair to make wigs for people who’ve lost theirs to chemotherapy, but you can’t write off the donation on your taxes, as the hair itself is considered value-less. However, the person buying your hair-wig can write it off as a medical expense. In summary: hair itself is not a commodity, but a wig made from hair is. I venture that there is no commodity version of fingernails.)

Then, there's the biggest nail sale of all—in December 2000, world-record holding creep Shridhar Chillal sought to sell the nails from his left hand, which ranged in length from 40 to 52 inches, to a total of 226 inches. Even if Revlon’s rumored rate was ten dollars an inch rather than ten dollars for ‘over an inch long,’ and assuming they had any use whatsoever for Chillal’s horn-like nails, he would have brought in only $2,260 for his forty-eight-year effort, which calculates to an annual accrued income of $47.08, about half a cent per hour of growing time—far, far less than he earned as a photographer, or through appearances as a professional freak. In fact, Chillal felt that his due was two orders of magnitude beyond the ten dollar an inch asking price. Reportedly, he wanted to sell his wares for at least $200,000 (a mere $4,167 per year, or 48 cents per hour—a relative bargain). So far, no eccentric millionaire has stepped forward to purchase Chillal’s clippings to place in his collection of famous body parts. Surely, he could sell them online ...

In fact, fingernails do apparently pop up from time to time on murderabilia sites like murderauction.com and supernaught—auction sites for collectible ephemera associated with serial killers and other famous murderers. If someone, or rather many people, were to trip over Chillal's nails, fall down a flight of stairs and die—perhaps then he could get some return on his investment. A shame, but sometimes you have to work a little harder in a niche market.

Now, I've never killed anyone. Maybe a spider or two, but I don't think that counts. Could I sell my fingernails?

I checked eBay's policies and found that they prohibited me from doing so: "Humans, the human body or any human body parts may not be listed on eBay." Oddly enough, just under this, it says: "Virtues: eBay does not allow persons to offer or list human virtues such as their virginity or companionship on the Indian site" (italics mine—emphasis presumably theirs).

So no eBay, but there's nothing that prohibits me from selling my fingernails at a live auction.

<bang bang>

"Anyone want to buy my fingernails?"

ILL ESOTERICS: Peeling Bananas

By THOM HAWKINS

Yesterday, I came across a post on Lifehacker about how to eat a banana like a monkey. I immediately saw the advantage--often, when I peel using the stem, rather than the stem breaking, the back of the peel splits, resulting in a messy extraction. Here's the video (the monkey boxer shorts are a nice touch):



Later that evening, I was reading Good Night, Gorilla by Peggy Rathmann to H., and when I got to the last page, I noticed the banana peel on the bedspread appeared to have been opened from the base.


I flipped back through the book to confirm that the mouse does appear to have tied the string to the stem of the banana, so it really was opened by the base.


The next day, I asked my sister about this trick, and she's been opening bananas from the base since 1995, when her friend's boyfriend (possibly a chimpanzee--I never met him) showed her. She went fourteen years without telling me! Unlike in the video, she digs her thumbnail in just above the base, and then pulls the skin over and down.

Of course, all this flies in the face of the otherwise logically flawless "Atheist's Nightmare" video: