When Vampire Novels Get It Wrong–Part I

I admit it: I nitpick the science in novels I read.

Take Anne Rice’s Interview With A Vampire–those best-known vampire novel of the last few decades. When I read this novel, I couldn’t help being distracted by the fact that, when the vampires in it are draining blood from someone they can hear the person’s heartbeat (okay, I can buy that part; Rice’s vampires have supersensitive senses, including hearing) and the person’s heartbeat is getting slower and slower until the vampire drains so much blood that the person dies.

"This is not what would happen," I said to myself.

A person about to die from vampire predation would be suffering from acute posthemorrhagic anemia, whose symptoms are known, though in the real world they are more commonly caused by accidents than vampire predation. The symptioms include faintness, dizziness, thirst, and sweating. Gradually slowing heartbeat AIN’T one of them, though.

In fact, you get just the opposite.

If you suddenly lose a whole bunch of blood then there is a mechanical process that takes place which is relatively easy to understand. With the sudden subtraction of a bunch of your blood volume that means you’ve got LESS blood in your circulatory system. That means that your blood pressure goes DOWN. That means that your heart will pump FASTER to try to keep your blood pressure up so that oxygen can keep getting to your cells, and you will go into TACHYCARDIA.

Eventually, the amount of blood loss will overtax the heart’s ability to pump fast so that it can’t push through enough blood because the chambers don’t have the chance to fill completely and the heartbeat will be rapid and weak. The heart itself will also start suffering oxygen deprivation and you’ll have a myocardial infarction or "heart attack." Eventually you get things like uncontrollable falling blood pressure and fatal cardiac arrythmias.

Not quite so romantic–eh?

But in Interview with the Vampire it’s such a seductive experience that the vampires have to STOP themselves from draining a victim so that they don’t get drug down into death with him.

Why that is, I’m not sure. If all you’re doing is moving blood from the victim to yourself then (assuming you can metabolize blood), you’d be STRONGER as the victim gets closer to death.

What’s more, the process of killing a victim by vampirism would be so revolting that it would have built-in factors that would cause you to want to let go at a certain point.

Unless vampires do something that allows them to bypass the normal rules of cardiology, their victims’ hearts won’t just slow gently down as they drop into the sleep of death. It’ll be a much more traumatic thing than that with the victims’ hearts speeding up, getting faster and weaker and more irregular until the victim dies, possibly amid classic heart attack symptoms like chest pain and numbness in the left arm and nausea and vomiting and dizziness and things like that.

ICK!

What vampire wouldn’t want to pull away before THAT happens!

Reading the novel, I also found myself wondering: "Just how long do these vampire predations go on? Wouldn’t it take quite a long time to get enough blood out of a person to kill him?"

It turns out that the amount of blood you can lose without dying depends on how fast you lose it. If you lose it rapidly, you can only stand to lose about 1/3rd of your blood volume (3-4 pints). But if you lose it slowly–say, over a 24 hour period–you can lose up to 2/3rds of your blood volume (6-8 pints). If a vampire sucked you dry slowly, over the course of a day, he could get a lot more out of you before you died, but that isn’t the way vampire predations are typically depicted. They’re much faster things.

So in a classic vampire attack, the vampire would only be able to pull 3-4 pints of blood out of a person before the person died.

That’s still a LOT of blood–especially if it’s being taken from two little holes in the blood vessels of the neck. I mean, I assume from the way that vampire attacks on the neck are classically depicted that they’re either going after the carotid artery or the jugular vein, but even though these are large blood vessels, it seems to me that it would take a significant amount of time to suck 3-4 pints out of one of these, especially (in the case of the carotid artery) without starving the brain of oxygen and causing the victim to go unconscious for that reason (as opposed to hypnotism or something).

Such long predations might be possible in the seclusion of a house, but not in a darkened alley in London with lots of people walking around and stuff.

Now, I know that vampires are supposed to be supernatural beings who may have ways of circumventing what would normally happen in the real world in such situations (like their ability to hypnotize the victim into staying still for all of this), but I still think that the authors of vampire stories could do with some medical research as part of all the other research (e.g., of a historical nature) that they do for their stories.

The Economics Of Execution

There are certain pieces of "conventional wisdom" that I’m quite skeptical of. One of them is "The death penalty doesn’t really deter murders." Really? How do we know this? Whether one supports or opposes capital punishment, this claim is at least counterintuitive.

It would seem that executing a murderer would at least prevent him from committing repeat offenses and deter those murders–whether or not it scares off potential murderers from killing others. Further, isn’t the whole idea of having penalties attached to laws generally regarded as providing a deterrent? Why should this penalty be any different? Could the "it doesn’t save lives" argument be just wishful thinking?

I can imagine arguments that having the death penalty fosters a culture of death such that it actually leads to more murders. Maybe. Weird things like that happen. But where’s the data?

That’s why it’s nice that God created economists. They can be a big help in testing received bits of conventional wisdom and seeing if they hold up or if they’re just wishful or prima facie thinking.

The Sydney Morning Herald recently carried an op/ed piece touching on this that was startling:

NEVER have those of us who oppose the death penalty felt more convinced that we are right. And never has there been a series of more impressive-sounding arguments to suggest that we are wrong.

For most of the past century we have been secure in the belief that executing murderers does little to stop murder. That’s what the psychologists and the criminologists have told us.

But now economists have entered the debate. And they have brought to the task a dazzling range of highly sophisticated techniques originally developed to answer more prosaic questions, such as whether tax breaks encourage saving.

More often than not the economists find that executions do save lives.

As they starkly report their central finding: each execution results in an average of 18 fewer murders. Or, to present the finding in an even more unsettling way: any state that refuses to impose the death penalty for murder is condemning 18 or so innocent people to death.

Now, I know that claims of this nature are controversial and subject to testing and revision and reversal themselves, but it’s nice to have additional research being done. That’s how science–including criminology–moves forward.

READ THE STORY.

READ THE SUNSTEIN-VERMUELE PAPER. (WARNING! Evil file format [.pdf]!)

DISCUSS.

Christmas Wars Episode I: The Puritan Menace

Slate has an interesting piece on the history of Christmas and the war conducted against it by Puritans et al. in of all places (are you ready?) Massachusetts.

EXCERPT:

Between 1659 and 1681, Christmas celebrations were outlawed in the colony, and the law declared that anyone caught "observing, by abstinence from labor, feasting or any other way any such days as Christmas day, shall pay for every such offense five shillings." Finding no biblical authority for celebrating Jesus’ birth on Dec. 25, the theocrats who ran Massachusetts regarded the holiday as a mere human invention, a remnant of a heathen past. They also disapproved of the rowdy celebrations that went along with it. "How few there are comparatively that spend those holidays … after an holy manner," the Rev. Increase Mather lamented in 1687. "But they are consumed in Compotations, in Interludes, in playing at Cards, in Revellings, in excess of Wine, in Mad Mirth."

After the English Restoration government reclaimed control of Massachusetts from the Puritans in the 1680s, one of the first acts of the newly appointed royal governor of the colony was to sponsor and attend Christmas religious services. Perhaps fearing a militant Puritan backlash, for the 1686 services he was flanked by redcoats. The Puritan disdain for the holiday endured: As late as 1869, public-school kids in Boston could be expelled for skipping class on Christmas Day.

GET THE STORY.

Christmas Eve Homilies

Last night I went to Mass at a local Catholic Church other than my usual parish. It’s a good parish, where a friend of mine who is a priest often says Mass. This priest is an excellent homilist, and I was delighted when he came out to do the homily last night.

Unfortunately, I basically heard none of his homily. The priest himself was heroically battling with the sound system, which was misbehaving, but that wasn’t the major problem.

The major problem was that there was a father with a young baby walking up and down in the world-class echo chamber that serves as a vestibule for this parish, and the baby was exercizing the full capacity of its lungs.

It was also crying so loudly that it occasionally threatened to set off rounds of sympathetic crying among other babies in the congregation.

I was sitting in the back, and the baby positively destroyed my ability to hear anything that the priest was saying. I suspect he did so for much of the congregation–perhaps all of it.

Now, I don’t mind a little bit of baby tearfulness in the congregation, because it signifies two good things: (1) there are babies in the congregation and (2) their parents are religiously active. Those are two wonderful things, and I normally smile and remind myself of them when I hear a baby sounding off during church services.

But when a baby is totally out of control, his parents need to do something, because they do have some responsibility not to allow their child to ruin everybody else’s ability to hear.

Taking the wailing infant into a large, tiled echo chamber is not among the most responsible things I can think of to do in such a situation.

The ushers were quite useless in this situation. Indeed, though they were standing right in front of the doors of the nave, they didn’t even close the doors to the echo chamber for several minutes, lest the young father feel excluded, which made it impossible for the congregation (or much of it) to hear the priest’s Christmas Eve homily. Finally, they did close the doors–which are quite thin and so provided next to no relief from the sound.

"Perhaps the person minding the baby would like to know that there is a cry room," I suggested to one of the ushers.

"I think he knows," the usher replied, indicating that he would do nothing to alleviate the situation. "It’s too cold to go outside."

"Oh yeah," I thought to myself. "This is Southern California. It’s in the 50s outside and there is a think blanket of Christmas FOG in the parking lot. I didn’t even have to turn on the heater in my truck on the way over. That baby will really get sick and die if the father takes it outside for twenty seconds so that he can take the face-saving route to the cry room instead of having to walk in front of part of the congregation."

The ushers having determined to be useless and the baby continuing to destroy everyone’s ability to hear the homily, I *almost* took matters into my own hands to kindly and politely and warmly and helpfully inform in the young father that there was a cry room on the premises, but the homily ended (meaning that we were now in a part of the Mass where the congregation could at least roughly follow what was going on by memory) and the child seemed to settle down anyway.

I admired the priest for being able to soldier on with his homily under these conditions, beset as he was on two fronts (the baby in the echo chamber and the sound system’s refusal to behave). I was a little surprised that he didn’t pause the homily to gently invite the use of the cry room to help with one of these, but he soldiered on anyway. (And, yes, I know the reasons he might not want to.)

Yet I was disappointed that I didn’t get to hear the Christmas Eve homily of a particularly good homilist.

But I was able to read one!

This morning I discovered that the folks who do the Vatican web site have (mirabile dictu) put THE POPE’S Christmas Eve homily online–and he’s a good homilist, too!

HERE’S THE LINK.

I was interested to compare what the pope actually said with the highly political reading given to his homily in THIS REPORTAGE (which is better than most you get). The pope’s homily wasn’t just about stopping war and abortion. It was much more focused on Christ and the spiritual meaning of Christmas than the political stuff the press is interested in.

Which is as it should be.

So all seems right in the world: There are good homilies out there for Christmas Eve. There are babies with excellent lung capacity. There are echo chambers for those who need them. And there is a surplus of cry room space for those who wish to use it.

YEE-HAW!

Glory to the New Born King

Harkthe_herald Just a quick post to wish everyone at JA.O a Blessed and Merry Christmas.

Thanks to Jimmy for all the work and thought he puts into his ‘blog, and for inviting me to participate.

Thanks to everyone who reads and posts here, for your patient indulgence.

And THANKS BE TO GOD for all He is, and all He has done, especially for the gift of His Son, through the Holy Spirit, and our Blessed Mother.

Peace to all your houses!

International Man Of Mystery

Shakespeare"Who wrote Shakespeare’s plays?" has a much more controversial answer than "Who is buried in Grant’s tomb?"

In fact, numerous facts about the Bard continue to be hotly disputed, almost three hundred years after his death.

One of the controversies is whether Shakespeare himself may have been a Catholic.

In his day English Protestants were putting tremendous pressure on Catholics to accept the newly imposed faith, and laws were passed against those who would refuse to attend Protestant services (known as "recusants").

The result was that many people hid their Catholicism but continued to consider themselves Catholic and, when possible, to practice Catholicism in secret (e.g., by aiding and hiding priests who would covertly say Mass and hear confessions).

Others were more bold and openly declared their Catholicism.

Among those were Shakespeare’s father and his daughter, both of whom recused themselves from Protestant services.

In fact, Shakespeare was in the middle of a hotbed of secret and not-so-secret Catholics.

HERE’S AN INTERESTING INTERVIEW BY AN AUTHOR ARGUING THAT SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS CONTAIN COVERT CATHOLIC MESSAGES.

HERE’S WHERE YOU CAN BUY HER BOOK.

HERE’S SOME ADDITIONAL PERSPECTIVE ON THE QUESTION FROM WIKIPEDIA.

Setting The Standard

Pre-16 was long interested in liturgy and his book on the liturgy titled The Spirit of the Liturgy by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger is chock-full of his great insights on the liturgy. Now as B16, Pope Benedict has recently stated that papal liturgies must set the liturgical gold standard for other liturgies to emulate.

"Pope Benedict XVI today said that papal ceremonies ‘must be exemplary liturgy for the entire world.’

"The Pope was speaking to choir of the pontifical chapel, led by director Giuseppe Liberto, after a concert in the Sistine Chapel. Speaking extemporaneously, the Pope spoke about the importance of liturgical music.

"The importance of pontifical liturgy has become more pronounced, the Pope said. He noted that ‘today, with television and radio, many people, from all parts of the world, follow the liturgy.’ Those who follow the papal ceremonies are likely to use them as a yardstick against which liturgy should be measured, the Pope said. Thus the liturgy becomes a way in which the Pope teaches the Catholic faithful, giving them a proper idea of what they should expect."

GET THE STORY.