More Than a Conch-Fondler

Today a programme on BBC Radio 4 made brief mention of a scientist named Rumphius whom they referred to as, "the blind shell collector." I'd never heard of him, so I looked him up. Here's what Wikipedia currently offers:

Georg Eberhard Rumphius (originally: Rumpf; baptized c. November 1, 1627–June 15, 1702) was a German-born botanist employed by the Dutch East India Company in what is now eastern Indonesia, and is best known for his work Herbarium Amboinense produced in the face of severe personal tragedies, including the death of his wife and a daughter in an earthquake, going blind from glaucoma, loss of his library and manuscripts in major fire, and losing early copies of his book when the ship carrying it was sunk. In addition to his major contributions to plant systematics, he is also remembered for his skills as an ethnographer and his frequent defense of Ambonese peoples against colonialism.

That's a lot more than the Beeb's brief mention that conjured visions of an old man with sunken eyes fondling a conch.

I wonder about the chronology of Rumphius's life, when his blindness came on, and how he correlated his own personal struggles and tragedies of the with those of the islanders being colonized by the Dutch. I also wonder this stuff about myself and members of my family who are visually impaired and have fought for social justice.

Believing is Seeing: Blind Film #7

The film's title asks, What the Bleep Do We Know? One thing I know is that the phrase, "A wonderful story that I believe is true," might not be the strongest line to open a scientific statement. Many scholars and scientists have dismissed this movie as such tosh peddled by charlatans, but in light of mirages and other illusions that we experience on the sea, why not this phenomenon? Provide your anwers in the comments. I'll give mine in a future post.

Be Dazzled

I recently posted a video featuring people with faces painted like the band KISS. The clip hgihlighted three forms of figurative blindness: one mentioned in the song, one perpetrated by the fans, and third as a quasi-hallucination created by the makeup. While one person done up in that signature black-and-white face paint may look iconic (and even ironic), another effect occurs when entire crowds do it together: the individual disappears into the group, and the group participates in a visual effect called disruptive camouflage.

Disruptive camouflage occurs in nature, famously in zebra herds whose converging stripes throw off predators as to their number, individual identity, and direction they're facing. The Brits have taken two important cues from the zebra: the crosswalk (which they call a "zebra crossing') and a practice of painting ships that came about in World War I when they hired painters to decorate both war and commercial vessels with striped patterns. This was also an attempt to throw off predators—in this case German submarines, whose crew had to estimate a ship's distance and course before firing a torpedo at it. This "dazzle camouflage" could fool the enemy into thinking that a ship was turning or moving in a direction that it wasn't, throwing off torpedo calculations by as much as 55°.

A person with a retinal condition might see many things as if they were decorated by a dazzle camoufleur, only the cause of disruption is not tactical, it's the consequence of retinal cells being interrupted. The result is gaps in vision that the brain fills in with made-up stuff, including the whos, whats, how-manys, how-fars and where's-this-goings of people and things of every stripe.

The brilliant podcast 99% Invisible has an episode on dazzle camouflage. Listen to it here.