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Just another day in the Riddled offices.

Do Aquastors dream of hydraulic rams?

A recent post on modified-water polymorphs of H₂O brought a veritable flood of letters in the Riddled mailbox, calling our attention to our failure to mention polymerised water or polywater.¹ We apologise for the egregious omission. Polywater ... it's a stable viscous liquid consisting of linear strands of H₂O, that replaces water in the body when spread from person to person by sweat contact, and a disinhibiting intoxicant! Safe and natural when used in moderation!

So to make it up to the Polywater Marketing Board, here's a photograph of topless George Takei (from an early public-safety film encouraging responsible use).

Sadly, the Frau Doktorin is loath to accept the explanation that my deplorably disinhibited condition is the result of exposure to polywater in the laboratory.

That previous post -- focusing on the homœopathic implications of water polymorphs -- introduced us to Drs Salvatore Chirumbolo and Paolo Bellavite, two gentlemen of Verona University's Department of Medicine.² In the new physical state of water they had discovered, the stable molecular clusters have the same biological properties as histamine. The chain reaction of self-replication begins with a few of these clusters nucleating around (coincidentally enough) histamine molecules. This state was invoked to explain in vitro immunological tests that require statistical incompetence to distinguish them from control tests using non-magic water.

But wait, there are many of these polymorphs of water, one for each item in the homœopathic pharmacopeia! Bellavite's group reckon that water can also crystallise into a form behaving like an alkaloid -- again, self-replicating -- to explain how strychnine analogs can affect mouse behaviour at dilutions of 10^-60:

...in high-dilution pharmacology, there is no linear or proportional relation between the molecular concentration of active substances and the therapeutic effect. Thus far there is no satisfactory or unifying theoretical explanation for these claims, though some hypotheses suggest a role of the nano-heterogeneous structures and dynamics of the solvent water (or water–ethanol) on a mesoscopic scale...

And wouldn't you know it there is yet another water state for Adrenaline -- created by "the role of electromagnetic energies in doing nanosized and long-range organized structures into waters, structures able to inform cells and to result in a biological action".³

Now I am worried that the water in the bathtub will organise itself around my body if I spend too long soaking and form a kind of hydraulic tulpa that displays all my physical and chemical properties. The Frau Doktorin is equally skeptical about explanations for drunken inebriation along the lines of "It wasn't me, it was my exact double formed of structured water".

This is despite Gene Wolfe's authoritative description in his exhaustive non-fiction account, The Book of the New Sun:

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¹ There was talk of a polywater gap with the USSR and great jubilation when it closed in 1969.

² I have no idea how much immunology research by Chirumbolo and Bellavite was genuine before they went off the rails and devoted themselves to smuggling homeopathy, naturopathy, and Chinese crank medicine into mainstream journals. Chirumbolo is a technical assistant according to the University website and a Senior Researcher on his own website.

Their continued tenure at Verona is perhaps explained by a comment thread in Crooked Timber a while ago, devoted to "Gambetta’s theory of the signalling benefits of incompetence in Italian academia":

“Being incompetent and displaying it,” [Gambetta] writes, “conveys the message I will not run away, for I have no strong legs to run anywhere else. In a corrupt academic market, being good at and interested in one’s own research, by contrast, signal a potential for a career independent of corrupt reciprocity…. In the Italian academic world, the kakistocrats are those who best assure others by displaying, through lack of competence and lack of interest in research, that they will comply with the pacts.”

A comment by Dr Science summed up how incompetence works in a milieu of entrenched favouritism and mutual back-scratching between quasi-feudal fiefdoms:

I think the point is that incompetence is a truthful signal of loyalty. The incompetent must be loyal, they have no alternative.

A subsequent Crooked Timber thread discussed incompetence in more general terms. The closest anyone came to defending the Italian academic milieu was to point out that Economics departments in English-speaking universities are just as corrupt and incestuous.

³ Predictably, Quantum Mechanics is involved:

Geeks bearing gifts

It is purely a coincidence and not at all a shameless exploitation of recent tragedy that our new Anti-Face-Eating Cage has just come into stock at the Riddled gift-shop, which you will pass through at the end of your tour of the well-appointed Riddled Research Laboratory and Milking-Machine Maintenance Workshop. The Anti-Face-Eating Cage is available in all two sizes, to fit both adults and heavily-tattooed hypochondroplastic dwarves with detachable arms.
Other new additions to the Gift Shop, which you would know about already if you subscribed to the e-mail version of the catalog:

(2) Giant sea urchin cushion. Very realistic. Breaks the ice at parties. Screams of agony guaranteed. Replaces the Jubolitoire Exploding Fart Cocktail, withdrawn from sale due to one or two regrettable but unforeseeable incidents and the unreasonable nature of New Zealand's product-liability laws.

(3) "Objet Dart" vertical dartboard. A great space-saver, ideal for the compact apartment life-style. Encourages agility when dodging darts that miss the board. Trained dart-retrieval pigeon and disembodied levitating hands not included.

(4) Haven't you always wanted to dress up as an inflatable six-legged pig, possibly to attend a Dürer-themed costume party? Or due to an unwholesome fascination with deep-sea echinoderms? Now you can, thanks to Riddled Enterprises, always working to meet consumer demand, under the streetlight on the Vivian-Street / Victoria-St corner!

Six-legged pig production totally not outsourced to China.

Do not over-inflate Six-Legged Inflatable Pig. Over-inflation may result in lawsuits from Pink Floyd's copyright enforcement department.

4. Profit

1. The capture of the giant colon is a hazardous business that will feature in the next season of "Dangerous Catch".2. The giant colon is cleaned thoroughly before preservation.
3. The giant colon is carefully inflated.
It is now available for fêtes, street fairs and children's parties.


No cosplay or pointy helmets in the bouncy colon. Offenders will be asked to leave. This is for everyone's protection and enjoyment.


This means you, Mr McGravitas.

UPDATE: "I wear no mask".
In the comments, McGravitas refuses to remove his pointy helmet. It would be irresponsible not to speculate about its permanent fixture.

Abscessive compulsive disorder

Vet bills are punitive enough at the best of times. It didn't help when Mrs Spat went AWOL for a week to nurse her abscess to the largest possible size... thus requiring surgery and anaesthesia and heroic antibiotics and a post-op IV drip,* when she did finally show up looking starved, dehydrated and generally sorry for herself. The staff at the clinic were impressed, describing it as the second-largest abscess they had dealt with, and the largest where the patient could be saved. They welcome her further custom.
With the sutures removed and her shaven patch beginning to grow back, her resemblance to a haggis is not so pronounced. There is a second row of stitches lower on her belly, where the abdominal fat pad had turned necrotic and had to be removed. Let it be noted that the liposuction was for genuine medical reasons and was not at all cosmetic. Perhaps Mrs Spat can recoup some of her medical expenses by modelling for those zipper-bellied animal pyjama-bags.

Mrs Spat has all her old energy back and here she is showing her Flying Superman pose to BFF Doodleberry Cupcake.

Bonus couple time

* Also a drainage tube. I kept expecting a nurse to fling Mrs Spat over one shoulder and blow into the tube to demonstrate how to inflate the flotation device in the unlikely event of an emergency landing.

But all that doesn't anti-matter Now we found ourselves a black hole in space

This is not an eye-catching title* for a SRS PAYPA in a rear-previewed academical journal, so it almost sailed unnoticed past our vigilance and slipped under the radar of our metaphors.
Part of the Riddled mission statement is to monitor the Existential Threat situation, where as any fule know a threat is 'existential' if it leads to fear and trembling. "Seen any Existential Threats today?" I will ask AK at smoko after a long morning of unblinking attention to the journals and the CCTV screens. "Nope. You?" "Me neither. Though I did see a squirrel."

The menacing part is in the Discussion section:

What Chirumbolo et al. are proposing is that a histamine molecule in water can cause the water molecules to arrange themselves around it in a kind of quasi-crystalline cluster -- a cluster having the same chemical and biological properties as the histamine itself. Further, the clusters are self-replicating: they can catalyse the formation of copies of themselves across multiple stages of dilution and succussion. This is a whole new polymorph of H₂O, more stable at room temperature than liquid water.**


If a sample escaped from the laboratory it would nucleate a change of state of all the water in the ocean into more quasi-crystals (the Katz-Cray-Dell effect). This always ends badly, with waterspouts and mass extinctions and a nigh-universal inhibition of CD203c membrane up-regulation in human basophils.




But wait; another homeopathic threat to life on earth stands revealed:

69
But scientists who guided their studies based on [homeopathic] theory failed to make progress.
How can you say that, when the Materia Medica has grown to include 'homeopathic positronium' and 'homeopathic shipwreck'?! PROGRESS!

Posted by: herr doktor bimler | May 10, 2012 5:45 PM

71
herr doktor bimler @69
You forgot homeopathic light of Saturn. Perhaps we should hold a contest for the most ludicrous homeopathic preparation. Or perhaps not due to the risk of creating a homeopathic black hole of stupidity.

Posted by: Militant Agnostic | May 10, 2012 7:26 PM

TOO LATE! Behold the horror that is Homeopathic Black Hole!

PREPARATION The remedy was prepared by Rowan Jackson and astronomer, Peter Lipscomb, using an 8" telescope, Meade LX90 aperture telescope. A vial of alcohol was affixed to the viewing end as the telescope was focused on Cygnus X-1’s location within the Cygnus constellation.
COMPILATION Lori Foley and Sandra Haering, with students and alumni of the Northwestern Academy of Homeopathy.
METHODOLOGY Twenty provers took the remedy administered in 30C potencies. The proving was double blind format in which neither the supervisors nor the provers were aware of the substance they were taking. During the proving, provers logged symptoms on a daily basis and were in daily contact with their supervisor until symptoms subsided.

Exposure to H.b.h. (i.e. consumption of alcohol that had been in extremely indirect contact with alcohol that had been exposed to visible light from the general direction of an X-ray source) causes a variety of symptoms. These are precisely the symptoms for which H.b.h. might be prescribed. It inspires some skepticism, however, that the list of effects fails to mention baldness, or a renewed loathing for Disney Studio movies.

* Also eye-catching.

** Let us draw a discrete veil over their shonky statistics. They use multiple comparisons without a Bonferonni correction, and the Friedman non-parametric test for unmatched samples -- where the Kruskal-Wallis test is appropriate.

A word to the Ys

Sesame Street used to be really quite weird when it started in the Renaissance.