Thursday Things: Ghostly Ghost Ships Edition
19 October 2023. Vol 5 No 42. By Dan McGirt. #219
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Haunted rowboat can also be a thing. It counts! Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash
Master of magic
This week I learned that “the University of Exeter will offer a postgraduate degree in magic and occult science, which the school says is the first of its kind at a British university.”
On first blush, this sounds kooky — is a degree from Hogwarts a prerequisite? As a sometimes fantasy author, I see story possibilities in this news.
However, all is not as it seems:
A U.K. University Will Confer a New Title: A Master’s Degree in the Occult
Prof. Emily Selove, the head of the new program and an associate professor in medieval Arabic literature, said the idea for the degree, which will be offered starting in September 2024, came out of the recent surge in interest in the history of witchcraft and a desire to create a space where research on magic could be studied across academic fields.
Coursework will include the study of Western dragons in lore, literature and art; archaeology theory; the depiction of women in the Middle Ages; the practice of deception and illusion; and the philosophy of psychedelics. Through the lenses of Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions, lecturers will explore how magic has influenced society and science.
So students won’t be learning to cast spells and lift curses.1 Rather, they will study the history and influence of belief in magic across various eras and fields of human endeavor.
I am always interested in learning what people believed in the past about how the universe works — indeed, many people today still hold to various magical explanations of and understandings of the world. I put no stock in magic as such, but the psychology of it all is fascinating. I’m almost tempted to enroll at Exeter. Perhaps you’re also intrgued.
And if Exeter doesn’t appeal to you, there are other options:
The University of Amsterdam offers a specialization in Western esotericism. The religion department at Rice University in Texas offers a certificate in gnosticism, esotericism and mysticism.
That said, learning the magic of coding and AI prompts would probably be a better use of your time and mine. That, too, is a magic of sorts!
The vibe is right in Exeter, to be sure. Photo by Nick Hawkes on Unsplash
Ghost ships galore!
With Halloween fast approaching, we’ll continue our spooky and magical theme this week with another Thursday Things favorite: listicles!
No helpful household tips this week, though. Nope, this time we’ve got ghost ships!
10 'Ghost Ships' That Mysteriously Disappeared At Sea & Were Never Found
These are the stories of ghost ships that haunt the high seas and the minds of everyone who reads about them. These are ships that disappeared without a trace, that simply stopped sailing, and that may have even murdered their own crews. History proves over and over that sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction. These are stories of eerie ghost ships that really happened, and nobody can explain how.
The list includes classics like the Mary Celeste and the Flying Dutchman, but the rest of the eerie tales on the list were new to me. The story of the Ourang Medan was macabre:
In June of 1947, an officer aboard the British vessel the Silver Star picked up a mysterious, unsettling distress signal. It said: “All officers including captain are dead lying in chartroom and bridge. Possibly whole crew dead." Silence crackled across the line, then, one simple sentence: "I die."
The message was picked up by several other ships in the area, but the Silver Star reached the source first. It was the Dutch freighter, Ourang Medan, floating adrift in the Straits of Malacca. The Star's officer and crew boarded the ship to find bodies strewn about the decks, their faces fixed in a cry of pain. Even the ship's dog was dead.
The bodies were unharmed. There was no sign of injury or attack…
And there’s even a ghostly steamboat, the Eliza Battle:
On March 1, 1858, the huge steamboat Eliza Battle caught fire in what would become the biggest maritime disaster in Tombigbee River - which flows between Mississippi and Alabama - history. 33 people died.
The Ship had been loaded with over 1,200 bales of cotton. Sometime during the night of March 1, a strong north wind began to blow, and somehow the cotton bales on deck caught fire. The flames soon engulfed the ship, and the passengers and crew jumped overboard.
Today, people still tell tales of sightings of the Eliza Battle floating down the river, wreathed in fire, and the sounds of 33 people screaming in pain and calling out for help.
That would be quite a sight, and one I can quite well do without seeing.
Check out the rest of these ghostly vignettes. What is your favorite ghost ship or other haunted venue?
“We’re definitely off course, Cap’n.” Photo by Lan Gao on Unsplash
Blood will tell
And now some news for the discriminating vampire — the blood of centenarians is different.
Researchers did detailed analysis of the blood of people who lived past the age of 100 and the blood of their “short-lived peers”.2 They found notable, though not huge, differences in multiple biomarkers.
The Blood of Exceptionally Long-Lived People Shows Key Differences
When exploring which biomarkers were linked to the likelihood of reaching 100, we found that all but two (alat and albumin) of the 12 biomarkers showed a connection to the likelihood of turning 100. This was even after accounting for age, sex and disease burden.
The people in the lowest out of five groups for levels of total cholesterol and iron had a lower chance of reaching 100 years as compared to those with higher levels. Meanwhile, people with higher levels of glucose, creatinine, uric acid and markers for liver function also decreased the chance of becoming a centenarian.
In absolute terms, the differences were rather small for some of the biomarkers, while for others the differences were somewhat more substantial.
For uric acid, for instance, the absolute difference was 2.5 percentage points. This means that people in the group with the lowest uric acid had a 4% chance of turning 100 while in the group with the highest uric acid levels only 1.5% made it to age 100.
Even if the differences we discovered were overall rather small, they suggest a potential link between metabolic health, nutrition and exceptional longevity.
The study, however, does not allow any conclusions about which lifestyle factors or genes are responsible for the biomarker values.
Read the article to learn about all the different biomarkers they screened for. How can you use this news? If you’re not a vampire, I’m not sure. But it is interesting, isn’t it?
Blood always is…
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Or so the Exeter faculty would have us believe…
Which I can only assume means blood samples of people who died before age 100. Because otherwise how would you know they aren’t going to pass 100 eventually too?