Add Homonym Attacks! #19
Ad Hominem: Appealing to personal considerations rather than to logic or reason.
Ad Hominem Attack: An argument that focuses on a personal attack as opposed to the subject in question.
Add Homonym Attacks!: The process by which one inserts a homophone and it bites you.
(It also serves as the title to Inside Pulse’s representative column in the world of Critical Thinking, Science and Skepticism.)
BUT FIRST
So, despite having a full two weeks between these columns, I still managed to get a late start on this thing. I blame the hours I spent this week playing Super Smash Brothers and Hungry Hungry Hippos for the benefit of my young daughter. On May 15th she will be three. Email me if you want to send her a present. She likes little people (the toys and the midgets), money, and Spider-man.
The Vampire
Okay, so the term “Vampire” means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. My handy dandy Oxford dictionary defines vampire as:
>noun 1 (in folklore) a corpse supposed to leave its grave at night to drink the blood of the living. 2 (also vampire bat) a small bat that feeds on blood by piercing the skin with its incisor teeth, found mainly in tropical America.
-DERIVATIVES vampiric >adjective vampirism >noun.
-ORIGIN Hungarian vampir, perhaps from Turkish uber ‘witch’.
But the term carries a lot more baggage than can be inferred by these definitions. Interpretations of the vampire differ not only from culture to culture, but from person to person. Some may immediately jump to the actual vampire bats, while others might think of a movie Dracula turning into a bat. Some might imagine a women who is a drain on her lover, or a vampire literally draining the blood from a victim. We have Anne Rice Euro-trash femmes, we have Nosferatu‘s revolting Count Orlock, we have Chupacabras, punk rockers, fringe Goths, and a world of other notions.
So what can we say for certain? Can we say that there are no such things as vampires? Not really. We have people that self label as vampires. We have vampire bats. We have all sorts of natural and unnatural weirdos out there. All we can do is take a look at the probabilities of vampiric characteristics. We’re looking mostly at the characteristic of vampires in modern fiction.
Drinking Blood
Historically speaking, drinking blood isn’t too hard to find. For instance, the Aztecs are believed to both drink human blood and eat human hearts during certain rituals. We find ritual drinking of animal blood in a couple of cultures. You’ll also find various cultural delicacies of animal blood: I believe in Vietnam one can find bars which serve bat and cobra blood.
Then we should also consider transubstantiation.
>noun Christian Theology the doctrine that the bread and wine of the Eucharist are converted into the body and blood of Christ at consecration.
-ORIGIN from Latin transubstantiare ‘change in substance’.
Catholic doctrine has it that the wine is actually, literally blood.
It’s not of course, but we can still count it.
I guess the main concern we should have in regard to the vampire question is this one: Does blood provide enough calories to sustain an active night life.
I consulted this here site for some of the methodology of calculating the caloric content of blood. Sadly, I don’t have a calorimeter. Let’s say that our vampire drinks 1/2 a liter of blood, roughly 1 pint. We’re talking food calories here. I.e. When I say calorie I mean “kilocalorie” and NOT the amount of heat required to raise 1 g of water 1 degree centigrade.
Let’s start with glucose. Now being diabetic, I know that a good blood sugar level is under 100 mg/dL, which translates to 1 gram per liter. We’re talking about a half liter of blood therefore a half of gram of glucose. Now sugars have under 4 calories per gram, so the calories from a person with a normal blood sugar would amount to less than 2. So the vampire isn’t getting a significant source of carbs from the blood.
They tell me that a good protein level for plasma is 7g/dL, or 70 grams per liter. Blood is roughly 1/2 plasma, and we’re dealing with 1/2 a liter, so we have to divide that 70 by 4. BUT protein has a 4 calories per gram, so we’d just multiply it by 4 after we divided it by 4. At any rate we get 70 grams of protein from the plasma.
The fat content of plasma is about 600mg/dL, or 6 grams per liter. We’d have to once again divide by four to get the number of lipid grams in 1/2 a liter of plasma. Fat contains about 9 calories per gram, so that leaves us with a about 13 calories from plasma fat.
So figure our vampire is maybe getting 85 calories from a half a liter of plasma.
The meat of the meal comes from the red blood cells. A woman has a hemoglobin level of about 14 g/dL so 140 grams per liter. That is considering the whole blood. So a half liter of that gives us 70 grams of hemoglobin (i.e. PROTEIN). Again protein has 4 calories per gram, so that leaves us with 280 calories from red blood cells.
So all in all 1/2 a liter of blood would have about 365 calories. We can round this number down to a more workable 350 as our methods aren’t terribly precise to begin with.
350 calories is a nice size meal, but nowhere near a 2000 calorie diet. So let’s up the blood intake. 1 whole liter would then contain about 700 calories. The vampire would need around 3 liters of blood to achieve a healthy diet of 2,100 calories. If he wanted his victims to live in order to sneak by unnoticed by humans, he’d probably want to stick to about our earlier number of 1/2 a liter per person (which is about how much somebody who donates blood gives). So he’d need 6 victims nightly to achieve this thing.
Ah, I know what you are thinking. The vampire doesn’t need a full 2000 calories, as he doesn’t need to do things like breathe or beat his heart. This thing might be a valid point, but we must also take into account that these fictional vampires also have superhuman powers, such a enhanced strength, flight, etc. So I am thinking 2000 calories seems fair.
All in all, the vampire would have to work fairly hard to maintain his cover and get a proper supply of food.
Flight
So at least in a bunch of movies, vampires can change into bats and fly. The problem is, well, they mostly change into teeny tiny bats. This thing violates conservation of mass. We cannot throw that baby out the window without putting the kibosh on the whole physical world.
Let’s see how we might solve this problem.
Solution 1: The vampire is able to change into a normal sized bat, and the bat is just super dense. We cannot accept this answer as a super dense bat would not be able to fly.
Solution 2: The vampire is able to change into a normal sized bat, and in human form he maintains the mass of the bat. This solution would lead to a very small density to the vampire in his humanoid state. We’d be able to knock him around like a balloon. We cannot accept this solution.
Solution 3: The vampire has a mass of around 100 kilos in humanoid form, and becomes a very large bat of appropriate density. This would seem to be a better solution, but we must take some factors into account. A golden eagle has a body which is comparable in size to a housecat, yet it has a 6 foot wingspan. We’re we to keep this ratio, we’d be looking at a Bat-Form vampire with a wingspan of over 60 feet. Surely this thing cannot go unnoticed.
The vampire should not be able to fly by any conventional means.
Aversion to Religious Symbols
This one varies from source to source. I believe I saw a hammer film in which our Count Dracula was killed by the shadow of a windmill forming a cross. Certainly, a thing which is so easily killed is not a thing to be dreaded. It would be very difficult to go through one’s life avoiding all perpendicular lines.
Then, we have numerous other religious symbols. The ubiquitous Jesus-fish that you see on cars, for instance. Would a vampire be weakened by such a thing? How about actual fish? How far can the image deviate? Would a picture of Charlie the Tuna freeze a blood-sucker in his path?
Aversion to Sun Light
This thing isn’t too improbable. There are numerous diseases which cause aversion to sun light (I believe meningitis will even cause such a thing). Hell, UV radiation in large doses is damaging to everything. People get skin cancer all the goldurn time.
Although, there are two things I should point out:
1. Stoker’s original novel said only that sun light placed some limitations on Dracula’s power.
2. There is no known medical condition for which sunlight causes a person to explode like many modern vampire interpretations. Most large animals don’t often explode.
Lucard’s Note: It was until the film Nosferatu that sunlight became a fatal weakness to vampires. Blame that little twist, like silver moving from vampires to werewolves, on Hollywood
Having No Reflection
This one is a really tricky one. A common characteristic of vampires is that of having no reflection. (The short lived BBC show “Ultraviolet” really gets a lot of mileage out of this thing. It is super shwanky, check it out.) How can vampires have no reflection?
A common answer is that they have no soul. Fuck that shit. I have never noticed myself to have a soul and I still have a goddamned reflection. It isn’t my soul I see in the mirror, it is my reflection.
You see, the problem is this: We don’t see stuff; we see light bouncing off of stuff. Light bounces in a particular way, and if some of that bouncing light hits our eyeballs, they can send a signal into our brain to process the dang thing as an image. With a mirror, the light merely bounces off of a reflected surface before it get to our eyes. How could it be that light which has bounced off of a vampire would not reflect off of a polished surface?
For that I have no answer.
Furthermore, even if the vampire himself has no reflection, what about his clothes? Would the mirror show an empty suit? Why should his clothes have no reflection? Do they too lack a soul? I don’t think my Haggar slacks have a soul, but I can still see them in the mirror.
Some stories (like “Ultraviolet”) extend this “no reflection” business to include not appearing on video cameras, tape, or being able to transmit their voice electronically. Theoretically the same unexplained mechanism would be at work for this thing too, but I am lost in trying to describe what that thing might be.
Dracula as Vlad the Impaler
Here is a short answer for y’all. According to Elizabeth Miller’s 2000 book, Dracula: Sense & Nonsense he ain’t. According to Miller, Stoker merely borrowed the nickname of Vlad Tepes to give to a character he had already created. We can thank Vlad that the character’s name of Count Wampyr did not stick, but that is about all.
Lucard’s note: Miller is wrong to a degree. Stoker’s diary and the original pre dracula version of the book, called “The Un-Dead,” are viewable in a museum in Philadelphia and the diary was even reprinted on a VERY limited scale. While it is true the original vampiric character of the novel was based on a combination of Henry Irving (Stoker’s boss) and Oscar Wilde (Stoker’s long time arch rival for the hand of the woman who would eventually become Stoker’s wife. Yes, I know. The irony there is DRIPPING), once Stoker was introduced to Dracula/Vlad the Impaler by a creepy Romanian history in the British Museum, Stoker researched like crazy and then completely re-wrote the character.
So what have we learned?
Well, let’s see.
1.Blood isn’t a terrible source for calories, and fairly protein rich and low in carbs and fat.
2. It is a bitch and a half to get big things to fly.
3. Having no reflection is a bitch to figure out.
4. The sun, while potentially hazardous in many ways, doesn’t make many things explode.
Adding all of these things together we can draw the conclusion that people can drink blood and some have. We cannot demonstrate how this act would cause anybody to gain any particular powers, abilities or weaknesses. By all reasonable estimates, people that drink blood should still be incapable of flight, be no less averse to perpendicular lines, and still reflect light normally.
We can also assume that the Vampire Hunters currently stalking my editor are collectively crazier than a football bat.
