Nick Kam

At the end of last year, media outlets around the world lit up with news of the birth of conjoined twins in Brazil. The boys, Jesus and Emanuel, exhibit dicephalic parapagus conjoining, the same union as Americans Brittany and Abigail Hensel. They differ in that the share only one set of vital organs. Doctors credit the Hensel twins’ dual set of organs with their success into adulthood. Questions of separation, as always, abound.

Whenever conjoined twins come along, it’s interesting to note how  journalist and doctors comment on their individuality. A few examples below:

“A Brazilian baby was born with two heads, named Jesus and Emanuel, but appears to be in good health, according to doctors.” — International Business Times

“Despite all the problems we have as a small interior hospital we managed to save both mother and baby, which was our aim.” — Hospital director Claudionor Assis de Vasconcelos

“They are being monitored by specialists to see how they develop.” — BBC News

In the first two quotes, the commentator refers to the twins in the singular. In the latter quote the writer uses the plural pronoun “they” to signify their duplicative personhood.

The teratologist Saint-Hilaire noted that conjoined twins were given separate names, indicating their individuality, as springing from the practice of baptizing children on their heads. A body with well-formed two heads was therefore baptized once on each head and each received a name.

As science and medicine evolved, so did our longevity. While most conjoined twins would die in infancy 100 years ago, with the advent of modern medicine and an appreciable understanding of conjoinment (Chang and Eng Bunker could have been easily separated), conjoined twins can survive well past infancy and into adulthood. This allows us to appreciate the separate personalities that conjoined twins take on as the grow older, giving credence to the argument that there are in fact two individuals present in one entangled body.

One could argue then that under this logic a person exhibiting multiple personality disorder should be granted personhood for every personality in their brain. Regardless of the fact that multiple personality disorder lacks the physical component of conjoinment, the difference lies in the fact that multiple personality disorder, at least in theory, is curable.

“But wait!” the skeptic shouts, “conjoined twins can be separated!” A brilliant segue indeed.

Simultaneously with the news of Jesus and Emmanuel’s births came the news of the possibility of separation.  ”A lot of work is needed, in terms of scans and tests, before doctors will know if they can separate them or not, and just how organs and blood vessels are shared and linked. It takes quite a while before they can decide how feasible [separation] is.” – Patrick O’Brien, a spokesman for the UK’s Royal College of Obstetrician and Gynaecologists. Later, doctors would reveal that separating the twins is  not an option because they share a set of organs. Attempting to separate them would be to kill one if not both of them (see Jodie and Mary).

Days before the birth of Jesus and Emmanuel, Chilean conjoined twins Maria Paz and Maria Jose (pictured above) made their way into the news. When the girls were 10-months old, doctors assessed their conjoinment and determined that separation was feasible. The 20-hour surgery took place and doctors deemed it a success. A week later on December 18, 2011, the news dropped: “A 10-month-old girl who was surgically separated from her conjoined twin died Sunday after suffering general organ failure, said the director of a Chilean children’s hospital.”

Despite all the science, all the innovation, and all the careful planning, their success became a failure with the death of one of the twins. They “were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.” Alice Dreger is a bio-ethicist who continues to ask the question: should we separate conjoined twins? When conjoined twins come along, doctors’ first instinct is to wonder if they can be separated to give them a better chance at a “normal life.”

The thinking goes that we want people to be able to live the most normal life possible and conjoinment stands inapposite to that goal. But Dreger rebuts this assertion; perhaps conjoinment is what’s normal for them. For all the risk and possible little reward (rendering one as less than the Platonic ideal, reducing mobility in both twins, risking death), why does science encourage dangerous separation procedures? Instead, why not reconsider normal and accept that perhaps their conjoinment, their entanglement is the norm for these twins. If they can live full lives together, why are we so eager to rip them apart?

For Jesus and Emmanuel, separation is not an option. But the fact that doctors talk in terms of separation indicates that there is more than one person contained in these conjoined twins’ body, for it always takes two to tango.

Via MSNBC and BBC News.

Radiolab did a fantastic story on the 2003 decision which “legally” settled the debate as to whether mutants are humans, featured here previously. Kudos to Abumrad and Krulwich for giving this story the context of the meddling lawyers who started this whole fracas and Brian Singer, director of X-Men, who elucidates on the birth of the X-Men franchise during the Civil Rights Movement.

Via WNYC.

Using computer simulations, a Google software engineer (Iman Sadeghi) and a professor of computer science at UCSD (Henrik Wann Jensen) have explained the rare phenomenon of twinned rainbows where the primary bow of a rainbow splits into two. The repercussions of their findings:

We ended up pushing the edge of rainbow science.

Via CNN.

All-around stand-up guy, Jesse Dimmick

Two years ago, fugitive murder suspect Jesse Dimmick kidnapped newlyweds Jared and Lindsay Rowley after bursting into their home on a Saturday morning.

Now, he’s suing them for $235,000.

Dimmick contends in the breach of contract suit that after he entered the couple’s home in September 2009, they reached a legally binding, oral contract that they would hide him for an unspecified amount of money.

“Later, the Rowleys reneged on said oral contract, resulting in my being shot in the back by authorities,” Dimmick wrote in a notarized legal document, which said he was filing the counterclaim in response to a suit the Rowleys filed against him in September.

Ironclad reasoning, right? Not exactly, wrote the Rowleys’ attorney in their motion to dimiss. Kevin Underhill summarizes:

First, there was no agreement. Second, if there was an agreement, there was no meeting of the minds on the amount of money (Dimmick admitted the “offer” was for “an unspecified amount”), and so no binding contract. Third, agreements made at knifepoint are, you may be surprised to learn, not enforceable as they are made “under duress.” Finally, a contract to do something illegal (e.g. hide a fugitive) is also not enforceable.

Read the pleadings here.

Via Lowering The Bar.

A traffic officer observed Carl Nelson using his wireless telephone with his hands as he paused his car at a red traffic light. The officer cited Mr. Nelson for infraction of Veh. Code §23123(a). Mr. Nelson contested the citation on the basis that he had only been using the phone while he was stopped at the signal to check his e-mail. Mr. Nelson contended that he was not “driving” as required by §23123(a) pursuant to Mercer v. Department of Motor Vehicles (1991) 53 Cal.3d 753. The trial court found Mr. Nelson guilty.

The court of appeal affirmed, holding that Mr. Nelson was “driving” within the intended meaning of §23123(a).

The court acknowledged that the §23123(a) terms “drive” and “while driving” are ambiguous as to a driver’s fleeting pauses as he drove on public roadways. However, the court continued, §23123(a) includes such stops because “drive” and “while driving” commonly refer to a person driving along the public roadways, regardless of whether he stops fleetingly for a red traffic light or other impediments to movement that are beyond his control.

Further, the court found that Mr. Nelson’s narrow volitional-movement interpretation of “drive” and “while driving” in §23123(a) would likely result in numerous significant public-safety hazards on public roadways. Were Mr. Nelson’s interpretation adopted, it would open the door to the picking-up of phones to place calls and check voice-mail while driving but paused momentarily in traffic, with a car in gear and only braked, however short that pause in movement. This could include fleeting pauses at traffic signals and signs in stop-and-go traffic as pedestrians crossed, as vehicles ahead navigated around double-parked vehicles, and many other circumstances.

People v. Nelson via Law.com

Who’s the next John Yoo?

Via the NY Times.

“Given that he’s engaging in the First Amendment, we are walking a fine line between enforcing [the] local [sit-lie] law and honoring the United States constitution,” [SFPD Captain Denis] O’Leary says. “I just told officers to handle it with a sense of humor.”

Via SF Weekly.

Simon Glik was arrested for shooting this footage of police arresting a suspect after a car accident.

Glik was charged with criminal violation of the Massachusetts wiretap act, aiding the escape of a prisoner and disturbing the peace. On appeal the First Circuit Court upheld the lower court’s ruling that, yes, “in the First Circuit . . . this First Amendment right publicly to record the activities of police officers on public business is established.”

Additionally, the Court went on to add, ”Gathering information about government officials in a form that can readily be disseminated to others serves a cardinal First Amendment interest in protecting and promoting ‘the free discussion of governmental affairs.” Your rights [in the First Circuit] are safe for another day.

Via the Citizen Media Law Project.

Mercator v. Winkle Tripel

Map projections don’t get much play in the news these days, what with the economy continually going to hell. Yet they are truly one of the most contentious topics among cartographers today. Most are familiar with the Mercator project (ideal for sailors due to their true navigational charts) and the Winkel Tripel (found in most text books and National Geographic since formal adoption in 1997). Despite the ubiquity of rectangular world maps, for years the American Cartographic Association’s has called for their abandonment in favor of a projection that more accurately displays our world, despite the fact that every map must make compromises in depiction of a spherical shape.

In 1989 and 1990, after some internal debate, seven North American geographic organizations adopted the following resolution, which rejected all rectangular world maps, a category that includes both the Mercator and the Gall–Peters projections:

WHEREAS, the earth is round with a coordinate system composed entirely of circles, and

WHEREAS, flat world maps are more useful than globe maps, but flattening the globe surface necessarily greatly changes the appearance of Earth’s features and coordinate systems, and

WHEREAS, world maps have a powerful and lasting effect on people’s impressions of the shapes and sizes of lands and seas, their arrangement, and the nature of the coordinate system, and

WHEREAS, frequently seeing a greatly distorted map tends to make it “look right,”

THEREFORE, we strongly urge book and map publishers, the media and government agencies to cease using rectangular world maps for general purposes or artistic displays. Such maps promote serious, erroneous conceptions by severely distorting large sections of the world, by showing the round Earth as having straight edges and sharp corners, by representing most distances and direct routes incorrectly, and by portraying the circular coordinate system as a squared grid. The most widely displayed rectangular world map is the Mercator (in fact a navigational diagram devised for nautical charts), but other rectangular world maps proposed as replacements for the Mercator also display a greatly distorted image of the spherical Earth.

Think it doesn’t matter? Think it’s just a bunch of poindexters sitting around tapping their slide rules against their collective shoe? Wrong!

Who can forget the Baker-Shevardnadze agreement?

On June 1, 1990, then U.S. Secretary of State James Baker and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze signed a deal demarcating the boundary between Russian and US territory in the Bering and Chukotka Seas. The purpose of the deal was to clear up an 1867 deal ceding Alaska to the United States. After the deal was struck, it was unclear whether the boundary used the Mercator projection (a straight line on the map) or the conformal projection (a straight line across the surface of the earth).

Enter Baker and Shevardnadze who came to a compromise between both projections that seemed to be a perfect marriage for all parties involved. But the honeymoon was not to last.  The USSR contended the U.S. had cheated them by using a “crooked boundary,” yielding the lion’s share of assets and minerals to the U.S. With no way around the dispute the USSR refused to ratify the treaty before its collapse and Russia declared the treaty null. Since then, the U.S. has continued efforts to enforce the boundary based on the Baker-Shevardnadze agreement.

Via the BBC and Richard Sale.

Words cannot describe the disgust at the failure of the American legal system in handling this case and keeping these men locked up for so long.

Via Reuters.

See also:

• Leonard Peltier
• Rubin “Hurricane” Carter
• Sacco and Vanzetti
• John Thompson
• Johnny Garrett