Heading Nowhere

We hear people reffering to men accused of horrific crimes as ‘Ravanas’. The Lankan King has long been the reciepent of Hindu invectives. But Ravana did not do the kind of things these men are alleged to have done. As for his wickedness , could there be extenuating circumstances? He had to go around lugging nine useless heads along with a single functioning one—that maybe why he became frustated and mean. Consider that when one of the heads caught acold or sneezed, it was hell for the other nine. He couldn’t turn sideways without major contortions. If one head turned , all had to turn. If the head has quarrelled, they did not cooperate, leading to schims between the ranks. With four heads on the right and five on the left of the central one, he overbalanced when he walked to the side with more heads. He couldn’t visit friends because he couldn’t get his heads through their doorway. With all those heads, curling up in bed was impossible. Lying on his back all the time, he developed severe spondylosis. All 10 snored, generating a twister that sucked in the countryside.
At mealtime, his two hands could not reach far enough to all the mouths. At least four would go hungry. Only the central head had an oesophagus, the rest were probably connected to it, but he would have had just the one stomach. Each migt’ve enjoyed a different type of food: sorpotel, haggis, fish-vandaloo, murg-musallam, baingan-bhartha or mutton-biryani. The gastronomic assault dried up his gastric juices and created ulcers. As for alcohol, with just one peg each, 600 cc went into the stomach at once. No wonder he seemed to be drunk most of the time! When the heads conversed, apart from it being tough to talk from the side of your mouth, the cacophony must have been hdeous. The central head might have often tried to be chairman of the panel, but couldn’t get any of the others to listen. ROMANCE was out. If one bent forward to kiss agiral, the other nine jealous guys must have frustated him by pulling back just as he puckered up. So, two heads may be better than one, but 10 heads breed anarchy.

1.618

That’s the number PHI, one-point-six-one-eight [Pronounced as ‘fee’, not to be confused with PI (π)]. PHI is generally considered the most beautiful number in the Universe. PHI is derived from the Fibonacci sequence [1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21…..] a progression famous not only because the sum of the adjacent terms equaled the next term, but because the quotients of adjacent terms possessed the astonishing property of approaching the number 1.618- PHI!!

Despite PHI’s seemingly mystical mathematical origins, the truly mind-boggling aspect of PHI was its role as a fundamental building block in nature. Plants, animals and even human beings possessed dimensional properties that adhered with eerie exactitude to the ratio of PHI to 1. PHI’s ubiquity in nature clearly exceeds co-incidence, and so the ancients assumed the number PHI must have been preordained by the creator of the universe. Early scientists heralded one-point-six-one-eight as the Devine Proportion.

Ever heard the relationship between female and males in a honeybee community? The female bees always outnumber the male bees. Do you know if you divide the number of female bees by the number of male bees in any beehive in the world, you always get a same number, and that’s PHI. Have a close-up of a sunflower’s seed head. Sunflower seeds grow in opposing spirals. Can you guess the ratio of each rotation’s diameter to the next? That’s PHI. Even the spiraled pinecone petals, the leaf arrangement on plant stalks, and the insect segmentation – all display astonishing obedience to the Divine Proportion.

Nobody understood better than “Leonardo-Da-Vinci” the divine structure of the human body. Da Vinci actually exhumed corpses to measure the exact proportions of human bone structure. He was the first to show that the human body is literally made of building blocks whose proportional ratio’s always equal PHI. Don’t believe? Measure the distance from the tip of your head to the floor, and then divide that by the distance from your belly button to the floor. Guess what no. you get, that’s PHI. Want another example? Measure the distance from your shoulder to your fingertips, and then divide it by the distance from your elbow to your fingertips, PHI again. Another? Hip to floor divided by knee to floor, PHI again. Finger Joints. Toes. Spinal divisions. PHI. PHI. PHI. My friends each of you is a walking tribute to the Divine Proportion. Even the architectural dimensions of Greek Parthenon, the pyramids of Egypt, and even the United Nations Building in New York consists PHI.

When the ancients discovered PHI, they were certain that they had stumbled across God’s building block of the world and they worshiped Nature because of that. Even to this day many of us celebrate Nature and don’t even know it. May Day is a perfect example, the celebration of the spring….. The earth coming back to life to produce her bounty. The mysterious magic inherent in the Divine Proportion was written at the beginning of time.

NEVER LICK ENVELOPES

A girl, working in an envelope factory, one day licked the envelopes and postage stamps instead of using a sponge. That very day the lady found a cut on her tongue. A week later, she noticed an abnormal swelling of her tongue. She went to the Doctor, and they found nothing wrong. Her tongue was not sore or anything. A couple of days later, her tongue started to swell more, and it began to get really sore, so sore, that she could not eat.
She went back to the Hospital, and demanded something to b done. The Doctor took an X-Ray of her tongue and noticed a lump. He prepared her for a minor Surgery. When the Doctor cut her tongue open, a live cockroach crawled out!!! There were cockroach eggs on the seal of the envelope. The egg was able to hatch inside of her tongue, because of her saliva. It was warm and moist….. This is a true story reported on CNN. Andy Hume, the girl said: -

“Hey, I used to work in an envelope factory. You wouldn’t believe the things that float around in those gum applicator trays. I haven’t licked an envelope for years! In that print shop we were told NEVER to lick those envelopes. I never understood why, until I had to go into storage and pull out 2500 envelopes that were already printed and I saw several squads of cockroaches roaming around inside a couple of boxes with eggs everywhere. They EAT the glue on the envelopes.”

Mysteries of Sleep

Guess what you'll spend one-third of your life doing. Sleeping! Believe it or not, if you live to be 75, the hours you sleep each night will add up to about 25 years of slumber.
It might seem like all that sleep is a giant waste of time. But scientists now know that while you're snoozing quietly in your bed, there's lots going on inside your brain and body.
Cycling through Sleep
For one thing, you sleep a cycle of five different types of sleep, over and over each night. When you first lie down and begin to fall asleep, your body enters what sleep experts call Stage 1 sleep. You're still very close to being awake, but your brain begins to work more slowly. Your body relaxes, and your closed eyes start to roll around. If someone woke you from this stage, you'd probably say that you weren't even asleep yet. After several minutes, you sink a little deeper, into Stage 2 sleep. You'd still be easy to wake up, but you'd probably know you'd been snoozing.
Then you really relax and fall deeply asleep, into Stage 3 sleep. Your heart slows down, and you breathe more slowly, too. Noises nearby would probably not wake you. Finally, you sink into the deepest sleep of all, called Stage 4. Once you're in Stage 4 sleep, you're very hard to wake up. And if someone does manage to wake you, you'll be very confused about where you are and what's happening.
The first time you reach Stage 4 sleep after going to bed, you stay there for almost 20 minutes. That's the longest chunk of deep sleep you'll have all night. After that, you slowly move back up through Stages 3 and 2.
And then your sleep gets really interesting.
Sweet Dreams
As you come back up through a period of Stage 2 sleep, you shift into Rapid Eye Movement, or REM, sleep. It's called REM sleep because when you're in it, your eyes-behind your closed eyelids-slide quickly back and forth, and back and forth, as though you were watching the ball in a tennis game. Your brain becomes much more active during this sleep stage, almost as active as when you're awake. Instead of resting, a brain in REM sleep is racing! And while your eyes are darting from side to side, a very detailed story is running through your head: you're dreaming.
It's during REM sleep that you dream your strangest dreams, the ones that sound so very mixed-up when you describe them the next morning. As you drift into a REM-sleep dream of singing toothbrushes or a dog that says he's your uncle, your body changes, too. Your breathing and heart rate sometimes speed up. Scientists say that your brain waves-measurements of the electrical activity in your brain-look almost the same during REM sleep as they do when you're awake. When you enter REM sleep, you go from being completely relaxed to being ready for action. And yet, you never move. That's because you can't. You're paralyzed!
When you're in REM sleep, your brain cuts off all the messages that might tell your body to move. You never pull up the covers or even roll over. Except for your shifting eyes, your breathing, and a twitch every now and then, you lie perfectly still as you dream. Scientists guess that may be to prevent you from acting out any wild scenes in your dream and hurting yourself.
Does Dreaming Make You Smarter?
You'll spend more than two hours each night in REM sleep, dreaming. Why do you dream? Scientists are still trying to figure that out.
One idea is that dreaming helps you organize your memories. It gives your brain a chance to sort through everything that happened during the day, storing what you need to remember and tossing out details that don't matter.
Experiments show that REM sleep definitely can help you learn better. In one test, volunteers were taught a new skill. That night, some of them were awakened whenever they entered REM sleep. The others were awakened the same number of times but only during non-REM sleep. The next day, the people who got their REM sleep tested better than the others at performing the new skill.
Researchers now think dreams may be like exercise for your brain, and dreaming may actually help your brain develop. Newborn babies spend almost half of their sleep time in REM sleep! But adults, whose brains aren't developing so much anymore, spend only about one-fifth of their sleep time dreaming.
Going without Sleep
During the day your muscles are busy stretching and pulling as you run, jump, or even just sit. Lying down asleep and fairly still gives those muscles a chance to repair and grow stronger. Scientists carried out an experiment on weight-lifters. For one night, they allowed the athletes to sleep only three hours. The next day, none of the athletes could lift as much weight as they had before. If you didn't sleep, you wouldn't be as strong either.
As you lie snoozing, you're busy healing and growing. Your body is releasing more of the chemicals that help it create new bits of skin, muscle, and other parts of you. Sleep is so important for healing that when you're injured or sick, your body releases chemicals to make you feel sleepier. Just recovering from a sunburn can make you sleep longer.
In one experiment, scientists kept a group of rats awake to study what would happen to them. After one week with no sleep, the rats began losing weight, even though they were eating more and more food. Their body temperatures dropped below normal, and cuts and scrapes wouldn't heal. After 16 sleepless days, the rats died. Why?
Most animals, including you and those rats, have an immune system-a kind of defense force that fights disease-causing germs. Special cells in your immune system work every day to destroy germs that manage to slip inside you. When you sleep, your immune system has a chance to create more of those special germ-fighting cells. If you don't sleep as much, it cant make as many.
When the scientists examined the sleep-deprived rats, they discovered that they had become infected by germs that their bodies could ordinarily fight off easily. But in the overtired rats, the infections had just grown worse and worse. Without sleep, the rats' immune systems couldn't do their job.
You've Got Rhythm
If you've ever been around newborn babies, you know that night and day don't mean much to them. They might be awake at three o'clock in the morning and asleep at four o'clock in the afternoon. It takes months for most babies to adjust to the rhythm of sleeping at night and being awake during the day.
But like most people, you probably feel wide awake in the morning, even if you went to bed late the night before. After lunch, you may begin to feel sleepy. In late afternoon, though, you perk up and feel wide awake again around supper. Then, just at bedtime, that sleepy feeling comes over you again. The regular pattern each day of wide-awake times and sleepy times is called your circadian rhythm.
Inside your brain, in the region where nerves carry the information from your eyes, are two tiny clusters of cells, each about the size of a pinhead. They're what scientists sometimes call your biological clock. These cells seem to keep track of the time. They let your body know when to produce chemicals to wake you up or make you sleepy. They keep your brain alert and ready to receive all the information your eyes, ears, and other parts of your body pass along. Then, as night comes, they work with different parts of your brain to stop making wake-up chemicals and start making sleep-time chemicals.
Almost every living thing follows its own special pattern of sleepiness and wakefulness in the 24 hours of each day. Bees do, for instance. They visit flowers to gather nectar only at a certain time of day. And many flowers open at the same hour every day, too.
Sleep on It
Though there are still many mysteries to be solved about what goes on inside you during sleep, scientists know for sure that you need to sleep to keep your body healthy and your brain active. Missing just two hours of sleep one night will make you less alert the next day. You won't do as well in your schoolwork or physical activities.
And if you miss a whole night's sleep? Then you're really in trouble. You'll start to feel worried and unhappy. It might be hard to find the right words when you talk. You'll have difficulty concentrating and remembering, and your body might not be able to fight off

Sleep is so important, your body makes sure it gets some. If you're tired enough, your body will make you fall asleep, even if you don't want to. Adults who don't get enough sleep often take tiny little naps of just a second or two called microsleeps. They don't mean to take these naps. Their bodies just take them the moment they're sitting still. In one experiment, researchers found that overtired people could fall asleep even when their eyes were held wide open with tape!
Scientists still can't explain why some people need more sleep than others, or why some animals get by with a lot less sleep than people can. But one thing's for sure: getting enough sleep will help scientists figure it out

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE BEHAVIOR OF SERIAL KILLERS AS NARCISSISTS: AN OBJECT RELATIONS PERSPECTIVE

This article documents the definition and context of serial murder. The main theoretical framework adopted is object relations theories which have been particularly renowned for drawing close attention to the process and development of the early dyadic mother-infant relationship as a primary departure point for understanding both healthy and pathological psychic development. These theories have been especially comprehensive in depicting the inner world of the infant as magical and terrifying, fractured and kaleidoscopic. Within the context of narcissistic dynamics, one aspect of human behavior may be described as non-pathological and the basis for healthy ambitions and ideals, while another may be identified as pathological and destructive so that individuals behave in grandiose and murderous ways. Some of these individuals are sadistic serial killers who enjoy the sexual thrill of murdering and who are both pathological and destructive narcissists. This study examines the psychological roots of the behavior of sexually motivated male serial killers, and why they do what they do. The context of serial murder is presented, with a refined definition of sexually motivated serial murder. The development of narcissism is described as this forms the basis for understanding such behavior.
Keywords: serial killers, narcissists, behavior, object relations theory, murder, motivation, sexually.
Serial murder is perhaps the most baffling crime as it is difficult to comprehend that certain individuals would enjoy killing others. This kind of criminal and abnormal behavior is disturbing because it highlights a small but troublesome group of people in society who engage in acts of insanity and terrorism but who are not insane. Victims selected are most often strangers unprepared for the violence inflicted upon them. This article documents the definition and context of serial murder. As the focus is on sexually motivated serial killers, their characteristics are described along with the principal components of sexualised serial murder. A refined definition of sexually motivated serial murder is offered and in order to set the scene for the presentation of some thoughts regarding the psychological roots of the behavior of serial killers, the development of narcissism is delineated. The conceptual framework of object relations theories is adopted with the inclusion of some psychoanalytical concepts.

DEFINITION AND CONTEXT OF SERIAL MURDER
Serial murders, especially if they are sexually motivated, are perhaps the most repugnant acts of violence as they embody the ultimate capacity for human cruelty. Serial murder - which has been recorded throughout Western European history since the 1400s (Hickey, 1997; Schlesinger, 2000) - is a type of abnormal behavior which breaches the boundaries of consensual rationality and normality. Three types of multicide have been identified; mass murder, spree murder and serial murder (Holmes & Holmes, 1998a, 1998b). Mass murder is the killing of three or more people at one time and in one place. There is no, or very little, cooling-off period. Spree murder involves the killing of at least three or more people within a 30-day period and is also accompanied by other crimes. Serial murder is the killing of three or more people over a period of more than 30 days, with a significant cooling-off period. This cooling-off period may be weeks, months or even years (Geberth, 1996; Hare, 1993; Hickey, 1997; Keppel & Bimes, 2003).
The aetiology of serial murder is unclear. Researchers have proposed various sociological, biological and psychological theories that seem to offer a partial understanding of the nature of serial murder (Hickey, 1997; Hohnes & DeBurger, 1998; Geberth, 1996; Keppel, 1995, 1997, 2000; Keppel & Birnes, 2003; Miller, 2000; Ressler, Burgess & Douglas, 1988; Ressler & Shachtman, 1997). Some authors have proposed as the basis for criminal behavior the notion of a predisposition to violence (Lewis et al., 1985; Reiss & Roth, 1993) as well as an interplay between environment, biological factors and personality traits (Eysenck, 1977). However, theory appears to explain why it is rare for serial murder to take place outside racial boundaries or why it is that serial killers are predominantly male. To date, there has been no object relations approach to understanding the abnormal psychology and criminal behavior of sexually motivated serial killers.
Several authors have created taxonomies or classifications of criminal offenders based largely on the motivations of serial killers (Hickey, 1997; Holmes & DeBurger, 1998; Hohnes & Holmes, 1998a, 1998b; Schlesinger, 1999). What is apparent in these typologies of serial killers is that not all serial killers are alike and some kill for reasons other than sex. It has been recognized that the need for other typologies that are not constructed solely on the basis of apparent motivation should be advanced. It was for this reason that attention was turned to the careful analysis of the crime scene itself. In this context, serial killers are either organized or disorganized serial killers (Geberth, 1996; Geberth & Turco, 1997; Hickey, 1997; Keppel, 1997, 2000; Keppel & Birnes, 2003; Miller, 2000; Ressler et al., 1988). This notion of organized versus disorganized means that the personality types of serial killers have also been identified. Some are described as psychopathic personality type (Geberth, 1996; Hare, 1993; Schechter, 1990; Schlesinger, 1998) narcissistic (Money, 1990; Schlesinger, 1998) paranoid or antisocial (Geberth, 1996; Ryzuk, 1994) or as having bipolar mood disorder, temporal lobe epilepsy, schizoid personality and dissociative disorder (Hickey, 1997; Miller, 2000; Money, 1990). It is recognized that psychotic serial killers are extremely rare (Geberth, 1996; Hickey, 1997).

Science fiction, biotechnology and the shadow of September 11

THE EMERGENCE of science fiction (or "SF") as a distinct literary genre in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was occasioned by the scientific and industrial revolutions, which encouraged speculation about extraordinary technological innovations and future societies radically different from the present. That, however, does not entail that SF must be optimistic about science and technology, or about the future societies that it imagines. On the contrary, the genre's history shows strong and continuing cautionary impulses, often including scepticism about scientific and technological advancement. Science fiction, then, need not be, and often is not, pro-science fiction.
This cautionary tendency has been clearest, perhaps, with SF works produced for mainstream audiences by predominantly mainstream writers, such as George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World(1932). The latter, with its dystopian future of biologically engineered social harmony, is frequently referred to by opponents of biotechnology, such as Leon R. Kass, who in May 2001 published an article entitled "Preventing a Brave New World" in the New Republic. In this article, Kass argues that all forms of human cloning should be prohibited as a first step in what he foresees as "a long battle against eugenics and a post human future".
An element of technophobia is also apparent in SF cinema, which has given a particularly sinister image to biological scientists and biotechnology, displayed recently in Jurassic Park (1996), Gattaca (1997) and The Sixth Day (2000), among many others. The Sixth Day is an Arnold Schwarzenegger blockbuster that depicts an evil biomedical company which secretly manufactures human clones. The clones are grown to adulthood in a matter of minutes using genetically blank bodies stored in nutrient vats. They are programmed with personalities and memories that can be extracted from an existing brain in a mere second, using a computerised eye scan.
This kind of science fictional cloning technology tends to justify the irritating journalistic habit of referring to "mere science fiction". The technology depicted in The Sixth Day is scientifically absurd and certainly bears no resemblance to any current proposal for therapeutic or reproductive cloning using the somatic cell nuclear transfer technique that created Dolly (or any other real-world technique).
Overall, postulated biotechnologies such as cloning, genetic engineering and various kinds of technological enhancement of the human body/have been treated negatively in much SF, particularly in works that command huge audiences, such as productions emanating from Hollywood. In this context, SF often seems be anti-science fiction.
However, any attempt to examine the relationship between SF and the futuristic technologies that it postulates quickly encounters complications, and some postulated technologies, such as those relating to space travel, are the mainstay of $F in all media. Biotechnology, it seems, is especially feared and most frequently demonised, and even this is probably less common in the work of professional SF novelists than in movie scripts and one-off $F works by mainstream authors.
THE COMPLEX relationships SF and biotechnology were recently considered at an international conference entitled "Biotechnological and Medical Themes in Science Fiction", held in Thessaloniki, Greece. It was superbly organised by Associate Professor Domna Pastourmatzi, of Thessaloniki's Aristotle University. Pastourmatzi has lived for extensive periods in the USA and has an international outlook. She provided an excellent opportunity for writers, scholars and critics from a range of countries, including Austria, Australia, Canada, Greece, Poland, Sweden and the USA, to consider such issues as SF's Frankensteinian drift. The mainly Greek audience of about 200 was provided with headphones for a real-time translation service.
Australia's leading SF writer, Greg Egan, is largely ignored by the, mainstream literary community in his own country, but his work was discussed with enthusiasm in papers by Nerina Kioseoglou, a Greek translator, and Elisabeth Kraus, an Austrian academic, as well as in my own paper. Young literary scholars from Aristotle University delivered many of the papers, showing a burgeoning interest in SF at their institution, which has a strong Department of American Literature and Culture. Most of these papers were presented in English, and they were lucid and penetrating, though some of them showed the same mix of unnecessary academic jargon and a technophobic mindset that typifies literary scholarship in English-speaking countries.
We met, of course, in the terrible shadow of September 11, during the early period of the American and British bombardment of targets in Afghanistan. As a result of the terrorist attacks on the USA, some delegates from outside of Greece cancelled their attendance at a late stage. This included three Americans who were among the key speakers listed in the program as advertised: SF writers Greg Bear and Joan Slonczewski, and literary scholar Susan Squier. At the start of the first day, Pastourmatzi read out statements from these three, explaining why they felt unable to attend. The gist of it seemed to be that they were unwilling to leave the USA at a time of uncertainty, when additional atrocities were feared. They did not necessarily feel in any personal danger if they travelled, but were worried about being stranded in Europe, away from their families, if further aviation shutdowns proved necessary.