the history of “cold” light
“I was drawn into the history of “cold” light—luminescence—which started perhaps before there was any language to record things, with observations of fireflies and glowworms and phosphorescent seas; of will-o’-the-wisps, those strange, wandering, faint globes of light that would, in legend, lure travelers to their doom. And of Saint Elmo’s fire, the eerie luminous discharges that could stream in stormy weather from a ship’s masts, giving its sailors a feeling of bewitchment. There were the auroras, the Northern and Southern Lights, with their curtains of color shimmering high in the sky. A sense of the uncanny, the mysterious, seemed to inhere in these phenomena of cold light—as opposed to the comforting familiarity of fire and warm light.”
—Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, 2001.
“canary glass”
“[I]f one dissolved uranyl salts in water, the solutions would be fluorescent–one part in a million was sufficient. The fluorescence could also be transferred to glass, and uranium glass or “canary glass” had been very popular in Victorian and Edwardian houses. . . . Canary glass transmitted yellow light and was usually yellow to look through, but fluoresced a brilliant emerald green under the impact of the shorter wavelengths in daylight, so it would often appear to shimmer, shifting between green and yellow depending on the angle of illumination.”
—Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, 2001.
a yellow book
“As he was arrested [in 1895, for homosexual acts, Oscar] Wilde was spotted carrying a yellow book—in fact a yellow-backed French novel, but reported in the press as The Yellow Book. That reference and Wilde’s and Beardsley’s erstwhile collaboration on Salome were enough to besmirch [Aubrey] Beardsley in the scandal. . . .
Hostile stone-throwing mobs gathered outside the offices of The Yellow Book’s publisher John Lane, and several of Lane’s authors—fearful for their own reputations—demanded Beardsley’s dismissal. Overnight from being the illustrator most in demand, his name had become a byword for degeneracy: he was at once almost unemployable.”
—Patrick Bade, Aubrey Beardsley, 2001.
phototherapy.
Treatment of seasonal affective disorder with large doses of exposure to bright light.
—Essentials of Abnormal Psychology, third edition, V. Mark Durand & David H. Barlow, 2003.
rapid eye movement (REM) sleep.
Periodic intervals of sleep during which the eyes move rapidly from side to side, and dreams occur, but the body is inactive.
—Essentials of Abnormal Psychology, third edition, V. Mark Durand & David H. Barlow, 2003.
Rorschach inkblot test.
Projective test that uses irregular patterns of ink as its ambiguous stimuli.
—Essentials of Abnormal Psychology, third edition, V. Mark Durand & David H. Barlow, 2003. Please note: the illustration is not an actual Rorschach inkblot, but is, I am assured, similar to the famous brand-name blots. What do you seeeee?
Saint Vitus’s Dance.
Instance of mass hysteria in which groups of people experience a simultaneous compulsion to dance and shout in the streets.
—Essentials of Abnormal Psychology, third edition, V. Mark Durand & David H. Barlow, 2003.
sensorium.
Person’s general awareness of the surroundings, including time and place.
—Essentials of Abnormal Psychology, third edition, V. Mark Durand & David H. Barlow, 2003.
smooth-pursuit eye movement.
Also called eye-tracking; the ability to follow moving targets visually. Deficits in this skill can be caused by a single gene whose location is known. This problem is associated with schizophrenia and thus may serve as a genetic marker for this disorder.
—Essentials of Abnormal Psychology, third edition, V. Mark Durand & David H. Barlow, 2003.
somnabulism.
Repeated sleepwalking that occurs during NREM [non-REM] sleep and so is not the acting out of a dream. The person is difficult to waken and does not recall the experience.
—Essentials of Abnormal Psychology, third edition, V. Mark Durand & David H. Barlow, 2003.