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Howl At The Moon

PintQuaff said:
Going back to the whole moon/lunar/lunacy thing. One of the major factors to our tidal seas is the moon (and to a lesser extent the sun) stick that in a sandwich with the fact that our bodys are something like 75% water then you start to see why people either belive or do themselves act Derranged during a full moon (as your body is changing due to the same gravitational pull that the seas recieve).[/I]
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But the fact that the body contains all that water is one which has only come to light relatively recently. It's not something that would've been known and factored into werewolf/lunacy folkloric themes from the past.
 
Web posted Wednesday, October 27, 2004


Vecinos: Full moon madness


Carolina Morning News

Tonight the full moon will shine over Hilton Head Island at exactly 11:28 p.m.

The October full moon is also known as "Blood Moon" for its spooky red hue.

When some folks look at a full moon, they see a beautiful, silvery orb floating in a sea of stars. Others see a force that drives men mad, fills up emergency rooms and packs out the insane asylum.

Talk about a difference of opinion.

The moon is not cheese. It is a large hunk of rock approximately 3476 kilometers around that orbits the earth every 29.5 days.

Because the moon is large and fairly close to Earth, the gravitational forces between the two cause certain observable phenomenon. Because the Earth is mostly round and rotates faster than the moon can orbit it, Earth's oceans are pulled back and forth twice each day by the moon's gravitational attraction. Hence large bodies of water experience two predictable high and low tides and each day.

In other words, thanks to the moon's consistent and predictable behavior, boaters know when there will be enough water to float their boats in the Lowcountry's coastal areas.

According to folk stories, urban legends and anecdotal evidence, the following phenomena occur under the full moon because of the mysterious force it exerts upon living creatures:

* Men turn into wolves (women also turn into wolves since in the modern world there is no sexual discrimination), otherwise known as lycanthropy.

* Suicide rate spikes.

* Homicide rates increase.

* Traffic accidents increase.

* Domestic violence increases.

* Major disasters increase.

* Assassinations increase.

* Emergency room admissions increase.

* Birth rates increase.

* Vampirism increases.

* Sleep walking increases.

* Violence increases.

Many, many studies have been conducted to determine if any of the preceding conditions are really precipitated by the full moon. For every one study that seems to find a correlation, a dozen others find no correlation between human and lunar activity.

We won't even get into lycanthropy here, but for real science, we have a 1997 investigation by Gutiérrez-Garc'a and Tusell of 897 suicide deaths in Madrid. They found "no significant relationship between the (lunar) cycle and the suicide rate."

Their study was published in Psycological Reports, 1997, p. 248 in particular if you want to check it out.

So, what will happen to you if you stand under the full moon tonight? Get out early enough, 9:14 p.m. to be exact, and you'll witness a very special "blood moon" and a total lunar eclipse. You probably won't turn into a wolf so it should be relatively safe.

In order to fully experience the lunar eclipse, plan on spending several hours outside. The lunar eclipse is caused as the moon passes through the Earth's shadow, a trip that takes three hours.

As the moon travels through the shadow it will change from silver to orange to an intense, bloody red.

Have friends or family in South America? They can watch the same phenomenon, with a twist. The moon will be upside down. Yes, that's right. The moon over Buenos Aires is rotated 180 degrees when compared with the moon over Beaufort. Of course, your friends will think that their moon is right side up and ours is upside down.

I guess that sums it up. When it comes to the moon, it's all just a matter of perspective.

----------------
Chupacabra update:

The chupacabra, or goatsucker, is an elusive creature known to frequent Latin America in search of goats and cows from which to suck internal organs.

To be fair, many doubt the creature's existence, assigning it roughly the same amount of respect and admiration accorded Montana's jackaroo and Scotland's Loch Ness Monster.

Be that as it may, some folks try to be open-minded.

During a very recent sprint down to South America, I had opportunity to ask some gentlemen from the vicinity of Cordoba, Argentina, if they had any insights on the chupacabra phenomenon.

The consensus? Chupacabra sightings and physical evidence of chupacabra-like activity ceased suddenly and coincidentally with the United States' decision to lift an embargo on Argentine beef.

According to Carlos Ortiz of San Antonio, Argentina, the real chupacabra probably was a USDA inspector lowered by helicopter to take organ samples from unsuspecting cows as part of an organized effort to determine the safety of consuming Argentine steak. Hmmm. Mmmm. Good. Pass the A-1.
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http://www.lowcountrynow.com/stories/102704/LOCvecinos.shtml
 
Matthew said:
While there have been alot of movies and books on this subject I have found that the most comprehensive study of the werewolf and its history was a little know movie done in the eighties. It sought to show how this horrible affliction can be contained and focused. Coordinated movements among the dead as well as superhuman strength and rhythum. All the while the beast asking us "Don't be afraid" I'm not sure of the director, something like M. Jackson. Hope that helps :)
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Any idea what the movie was called, Matthew?
 
Yes, I had figured that. Sorry, thought I put a smiley on the end of that. :D

Ah, thriller. A video in which Jackson tells us that by night he turns into a member of the undead.

Sadly in reality, it's far more disturbing...:rolleyes:
 
JerryB said:
But the fact that the body contains all that water is one which has only come to light relatively recently. It's not something that would've been known and factored into werewolf/lunacy folkloric themes from the past.
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But clearly the folkloric themes could well be generated from the observation of a functional mechanism at work (Proximity [size]of moon has some effect on men's mind hence lunacy) even if the actual specifics of that function are unknown.

Your objection is akin to arguing that as we now 'know' that honey acts as a good antiseptic (and can explain precisely how it does so) it is invalid to suggest that the ancients used it accordingly without our knowledge.
 
Nice point and one sadly missed from many a mystery :vampire: :wtf: Ahhh must be Haloween, again!:rolleyes:
 
When I started this thread back in the summer it was about werewolf mythology. I have no idea where it's going now...
 
The Yithian said:
But clearly the folkloric themes could well be generated from the observation of a functional mechanism at work (Proximity [size]of moon has some effect on men's mind hence lunacy) even if the actual specifics of that function are unknown.

Your objection is akin to arguing that as we now 'know' that honey acts as a good antiseptic (and can explain precisely how it does so) it is invalid to suggest that the ancients used it accordingly without our knowledge.
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Honey's effect is much more readily observable than some assumed effect on a person's mental health. The way that the jury still seems to be out WRT the moon's effect on people shows how the whole subject may not have any basis in reality.
 
"Going back to the whole moon/lunar/lunacy thing. One of the major factors to our tidal seas is the moon (and to a lesser extent the sun) "

One or two sciencey things -

Gravity - from the moon or the sun - affects everything, not just water. A rock containing 0% water experiences the same tidal forces as a puddle of the same mass, it just doesn't move as a result.

The fullness of the moon depends on its relative orientation to the earth and the sun. The tidal effect of the Sun, which is about half that of the moon, adds to the moons when they line up. This is why we get particular high tides etc - its not the moon doing strange things.

One would also like to know what happens to full moon effects during daytime, or when it's too cloudy to see the moon...
 
Wembley said:
One or two sciencey things -

Gravity - from the moon or the sun - affects everything, not just water. A rock containing 0% water experiences the same tidal forces as a puddle of the same mass, it just doesn't move as a result.

The fullness of the moon depends on its relative orientation to the earth and the sun. The tidal effect of the Sun, which is about half that of the moon, adds to the moons when they line up. This is why we get particular high tides etc - its not the moon doing strange things.

One would also like to know what happens to full moon effects during daytime, or when it's too cloudy to see the moon...
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All accepted. But isn't the moon getting further away from the earth each year (by a few centimeters) as a result of Tidal Locking? (not really my field...)
 
Published Tuesday, April 26, 2005

Experts dismiss link between full moon, behavior

Myth may date back to days when people relied on folklore to exchange knowledge.

By Didi Tang
News-Leader

Does our world go awry when a full moon is shining?

Few studies say yes, but because of folklore and myths surrounding the moon, it seems hard to believe that a full moon has no effect at all on our minds and bodies.

"It's not supported by empirical evidence," said Debbie Fugett, a labor and delivery nurse at CoxHealth. "But on the night when there's a full moon, we're just a little bit nervous of what to expect."

And it seems the night does get crazy when the moon is full, Fugett said.

Gary Flack, a 911 dispatcher for Dallas County, would agree, saying the number of calls seems to go up on the night of a full moon.

"You get everything — just people doing crazy stuff: they imagine people, chase cows and see people in the woods."

In Springfield, however, police spokesman Matt Brown said no data has been tracked to show whether there's a correlation between full moons and emergency calls.

There's probably not, said Scott Brandhorst, a licensed psychologist at the Robert J. Murney Clinic of Forest Institute of Professional Psychology.

"There's no research that I'm aware of to support that," Brandhorst said.

A search on the Internet for "lunar effect," a term that supposes a link between full moon and behavior, can turn up hundreds of thousands of articles — many of them academic — that dismiss the possibility of the phenomenon.

"It's one of the myths that have been passed along through generations," Brandhorst said.

"We, as a society, use the full moon to account for someone's behavior."

How myth took root

So, if the effect is a myth (as most experts say it is), how did the full moon get associated with wild behaviors in the first place? After all, there's a long history of blaming it for acting out — the term "lunatic" has its roots in the word "luna," which is Latin for moon.

William Wedenoja, a professor of anthropology at Southwest Missouri State University, wonders whether the full moon had more of an immediate effect on people's behavior in the past.

"Basically (without artificial lighting) it's dark after the sun goes down, but if there's a full moon, you can stay awake later into the evening," Wedenoja said. That means, before artificial lighting, people could be more active on full-moon nights.

Also, Wedenoja said, a connection between full moons and out-of-the-ordinary events could be more a perception than a fact.

"We have the persistency to believe things even when there's no foundation," he said. "If you expect your patients to act odd on a full-moon night, they are always acting odd."

Rachel Gholson, an assistant professor of English at SMS who specializes in folklore, agreed: "Expectation tends to lead people to look for the unusual."

But where do those expectations come from?

"They support a cultural belief," Gholson said.

In the prehistoric era, people relied on folklore to exchange knowledge, Gholson said. Many stories were attached to the moon, she said, because people treated it as a mysterious power. Once the stories were shared, a cultural belief was created.

"Either way, the cultural expectation is reinforced, whether you believe the story or not," she said.

Sun does have effect

Terry Yarnell, director of St. John's Sleep Disorder Center, said bright sunlight does affect a person's sleep cycle, but moonlight doesn't necessarily do the same.

"It doesn't have the intensity (of sunlight)," he said, noting that sunlight is a powerful biological stimulus to wake people up.

The sun also affects the animal world, which becomes more active at dawn or dusk, said Tim Russell, wildlife regional supervisor with the Missouri Department of Conservation.

But what about the moon? Some hunters and anglers use lunar charts, and watches with built-in lunar phases are available for them, Russell said. However, despite some strong evidence that moon position and moon phase can matter, nothing is conclusive, Russell said.

But, like Fugett and Flack, Russell offered an anecdote: "Some fishermen swear that when there's a full moon positioned directly above, they get more fish."
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Source
 
JerryB said:
PintQuaff said:
Going back to the whole moon/lunar/lunacy thing. One of the major factors to our tidal seas is the moon (and to a lesser extent the sun) stick that in a sandwich with the fact that our bodys are something like 75% water then you start to see why people either belive or do themselves act Derranged during a full moon (as your body is changing due to the same gravitational pull that the seas recieve).[/I]
Click to expand...

But the fact that the body contains all that water is one which has only come to light relatively recently. It's not something that would've been known and factored into werewolf/lunacy folkloric themes from the past.
Click to expand...

Yes but before they found out how the human circulatory system worked, wasnt it generally believed that the blood in our veins ebbed and flowed like the tides?
 
Moon

Source
Blame it on the moon
Tuesday's event is a good time to indulge in a little lunar lust

By DEBRA McKINNEY
Anchorage Daily News

Published: November 14, 2005
Last Modified: November 14, 2005 at 06:16 AM


As the Earth's constant celestial companion -- rumored to have a dark side that it categorically denies -- the moon gets blamed for everything, from natural disasters to the fathering of children.


The moon doesn't mean to be a trouble- maker. All it really wants is to dance around us at the dizzying average pace of 2,287 mph, three times the speed of a .22-caliber bullet. And maybe mess with our tides (with a little help from the sun).

With a full moon rising Tuesday, meaning Earth will be lined up between the moon and the sun, a setup for maximum reflection of light, now is as good a time as any to indulge in a little stream-of-consciousness moon lust.

In ancient times, the moon was seen as the Earth's gated community, a place off- limits to mortals, where the gods resided and the souls of the dead could rest. The moon also explained the unexplainable, from madness to the origins of the universe.

The invention of the telescope in 1608 gave early scientists a little closer view. As scopes got stronger, they could see the moon was pockmarked with craters. In addition to craters, the biggest 184 miles in diameter, the moon has volcanoes and mountain ranges up to 8,000 feet high, lava fields and other features that can be detected these days with an ordinary pair of binoculars by those who know what they're looking for.

The moon was first visited by the Soviet spacecraft Luna 2 in 1959 and first walked upon by us in 1969. Now that we've been there and taken a look around, we know a lot more. Besides the lunar landscape being really gray and dusty, we now know things about the moon most of us can't pronounce.

It turns out nobody lives there, neither gods nor ghosts. So Wal-Mart's not interested.

Still, there's land up there for sale. Nice views. Very quiet. Lots of free parking. And no zoning whatsoever.

An Alaskan's dream.

At the moment there's a special deal on acreage on the northwest side of the Sea of Tranquility, where Apollo 11 landed, near the Crater Arago. No oxygen, but what do you expect for $29.99 an acre?

Seriously. Your "potential prudent investment," or slice of green cheese, comes with a certificate suitable for framing. Check it out at www.lunarlandowner.com.

In 1835, the New York Sun reported life on the moon. The story told how English astronomer Sir John Herschel, using a super-powerful telescope that could magnify 42,000 times, was able to make out all kinds of life forms up there -- 16 species of animals, 38 species of trees, 76 species of plants. Oh, and batlike humanoids with yellow skin and wings.

And this was way, way, way before acid.

A gang of Yale University professors forced the reporter to fess up to the hoax. But not before 60,000 copies of the article, printed as a pamphlet, sold out and a pumped-up preacher talked of selling Bibles on the moon.

The reporter resigned in disgrace but no doubt went on to make it big with his own reality show. You can read more about it at starryskies.com/The_sky/events/lunar-2003/moon.newyork.html. It's worth it.


LUNAR BADNESS

Time for fun moon facts.

The moon is 2,160 miles in diameter, 27 percent the size of the Earth, its surface area about that of the continent of Africa. As previously mentioned, its speedometer reading in orbit, relative to Earth (the moon is elliptical in shape rather than spherical), is an average 2,287 mph. It takes the moon 27 days, 7 hours, 43 minutes and 11.5 seconds to do one lap, all the while rotating on its axis, making one pirouette every 27.32 days.

Now that that's out of the way, we can go back to the really important stuff. Like werewolves.

We're pretty sure no creature changes from human to wolf on account of the moon. That only happens during Fur Rondy when guys wear those spooky dead-animal hats.

Which brings us to bad behavior.

Especially during the pipeline days, Glenn Shaw, now professor emeritus at the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, expected strange calls around full moon time, especially if those moons fell on a Friday night.

"Squirrel-food calls," he and his colleagues would call them. "Nuts." The ones he ended up with always seemed to come from places like Tommy's Elbow Room.

Guys on domestic beer would be arguing and making bets with their buddies; they'd call the university, and the switchboard would forward them to Shaw.

" 'Is this a per-fessor?' they'd want to know."

Then they'd ask if it was true there are more murders when the moon is full.

"Yeah," Shaw would tell them. "Watch your back."

After having some fun, he would set them straight.

No. Not true. There's no statistical evidence linking the moon to any kind of bad behavior.

Even so, you wouldn't believe the things blamed on the full moon. Women going into labor. An increase in traffic accidents, domestic violence, murders and suicides.

Sleepwalking, too. And casino payouts, aggression by professional hockey players, agitated behavior by nursing home residents. It goes on and on.

All of these have been checked out. Sorry. No full-moon defense.

Full-moon madness is one of those myths that's hard to shake.

"Well, you know the word lunatic comes from the word for moon," Shaw said. "Lunatic" is from the Latin word "luna." But it was the ancient Greeks who gave the word the bad rap. They thought madness was caused by excess moisture in the brain. Since the moon affects the tides, it made sense it would also tug on a soggy brain.


A MOON IS BORN

Several theories have waxed and waned on how the moon was born, including the cool sounding "Nebular Hypothesis," that says the moon and the planets formed from immense rotating and condensing clouds of gas.

Or that it started out smaller but snowballed bigger and bigger as it accumulated debris from space.

Or that while the Earth was spinning at high speed, it winged a piece of itself right out into space like a toddler flying off a merry-go-round.

Or that it came wandering in from elsewhere in the solar system and was snagged and held captive by gravitational forces.

The current theory involves cataclysmic collision, which ranks way higher on the special- effects scale than any of the above.

Travis Rector, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Alaska Anchorage, explained it this way -- in Muffy terms, by request.

"The accepted theory now is that a massive meteor hit the Earth when it was very young, a piece broke off and formed the moon," he said. "And the evidence for this is substantial. For example, the composition of moon rocks is very similar to rocks on Earth. A rock from Mars has a significantly different composition."

The portion that broke off was massive enough that its own gravity was able to compact it into a sphere, Rector explained. He also pointed out that we should be impressed with the size of our moon, which has about a quarter the diameter of the Earth.

"If you compare it to other planets in the solar system, if they have a moon at all they're very small in comparison."

Ours is bigger!


FULL MOON RISING

Now that we're so much better informed, it will be easier to appreciate Tuesday's full moon.

Too bad the best moon viewing isn't when the moon is full.

"It really depends on what you want to see," Rector said.

"It's very bright," said amateur astronomer Joe Wolner of Girdwood. "It will definitely knock your night vision right out."

Wolner is the more or less founder of the more or less astronomy club Chugach Stargazers Society, which he hesitates to even call a club.

The local astronomy community does get together now and then, with members offering public talks on a variety of topics. Mostly, it's pretty informal, though.

"Occasionally on a really clear night somebody will say, 'Hey, let's meet up at Flattop,' and we'll drag our telescopes there and set them up," Wolner said.

To view a full moon through a telescope you really need a neutral-density moon filter, he said.

During a full moon, the best show is those bright rays emanating like giant spokes from certain craters.

Rector explains:

"The rays are debris ejected from the impacts of meteors on the moon's surface. In addition to producing craters, they throw out debris in streaks that are called rays.

"They are best seen during the full moon because the sun is overhead (on the surface) of the moon, making it easier to see subtle differences in the brightness of the ejected material relative to the rest of the moon's surface."

If it's craters and other landscape forms you want to see, the best time for that is during the first and third quarter of the moon, he said.

"During the quarter phases, the sun is low on the surface of the moon, causing shadows to highlight mountains and craters more."

But really? The best time for moon viewing?

"When it's warm out," he said.
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