SHEER LUNACY

“The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.” - William Shakespeare

For Word Thursday today:

lunatic |ˈloōnəˌtik| noun
A mentally ill person (not in technical use).
• An extremely foolish or eccentric person: This lunatic just accelerated out of the side of the road.
adjective
mentally ill (not in technical use).
• Extremely foolish, eccentric, or absurd: He would be asked to acquiesce in some lunatic scheme.
ORIGIN Middle English: From Old French lunatique, from late Latin lunaticus, from Latin luna ‘moon’ (from the belief that changes of the moon caused intermittent insanity).

The full moon shines outside the window tonight and its silvery sharp arrows penetrate through layers of curtain to impale themselves on flooring, bedding, hapless limbs that are in the way. Luna, the moon goddess, a manifestation of Diana the virgin huntress. Luna lent her name to the ancient belief in the power of the Moon to make us mad. Modern studies have associated full Moons with everything from extra insanity to traffic accidents. But the connections have been thin. Perhaps the most well-founded human relationship to the lunar cycle is the menstrual cycle of many women. Some studies have found weak associations to increased aggression, unintentional poisonings and absenteeism. But other studies have contradicted these findings.

In recent investigations looking at animal aggressiveness, one study showed that animal bites were found to have sent twice as many British people to the emergency room during full Moons compared with other days. But the other study, in Australia, found that dogs can be pretty nasty on any given day irrespective of the phase of the moon. Both studies were published in a recent issue of the British Medical Journal. So whom do we believe?

The answer may have something to do with climate, weather and human activity as a result of the influence of the full moon on people’s mind. In Britain the weather is less clement than in Australia, and people are confined at home more (and hence safe from dog bites). In Australia, the weather is kinder and people tend to lead more outdoor lives, full moon or not (and hence more exposed to dog bites). As the full moon tends to attract more people outside, and in Britain they tend to go out more during the full moon nights compared to the rest of the time, and hence they run a greater risk to be bitten around the full moon night. In Australia people go out more, interact with dogs more on any night and hence get bitten on any night, whether the moon is full or not.

I think that there may be an element of truth in the moon-lunacy connection. If the moon is powerful enough an influence to cause tides of the earth’s oceans, surely it must have some influence on the watery substance of our own bodies. There are many things that happen around us and in our own bodies that we still have no explanation for and the influence of the moon on our bodies and minds is one of these. Until we know, here are some known facts about the moon:

• The moon is the only natural satellite of the Earth.
• It revolves around our planet from West to East at a mean distance of about 384,400 kilometres (239,900 miles).
• The Moon is less than one third the size of the Earth.
• It has a diameter of only about 3,476 km (2,160 mi) at its equator.
• It is only 1/81 as massive as the Earth and has a density of roughly 3.34 grams per cubic centimetre as opposed to 5.52 for the Earth.
• The moon shines by reflected sunlight, but its albedo (the fraction of light received that is reflected) is only 0.073.
• Its brightness varies through its cycle of phases primarily because of the roughness of its surface and the resultant variable amount of shadow.
• The Moon rotates about its own axis in 29.5 days, which is identical to the time it takes to complete its orbit around the earth. As a result the moon always presents nearly the same face to the Earth.
• On July 20th, 1969 Apollo 11 landed on the moon with Neil Armstrong and Edwin E. Aldrin on the desolate lunar plain known as the Sea of Tranquillity.
• The last U.S. mission was in December 1972.