my get rich quick scheme after this phd is a clear cash grab piece of pop history called Surely You're Joking, Mr Copernicus that's just an overview of the most common mistakes people make while trying to do physics up until the invention of the telescope and hack advice on how to avoid them. The sequel (telescope onwards) will be How to Win Nobels and Influence Grant Funding and it will start with Galileo being wrong about the mountains on the moon but getting paid anyway. And then I will accidentally usher in a whole new wave of anti-intellectualism and have to donate all my profits to the last five people fighting climate change to assuage my guilt.
Excerpt from field observations of what appears to be a draug
Their skin is pallid, from months, perhaps even years at the bottom of the ocean. A drowned person. A wet and partially decomposed corpse. One eye has been consumed by marine life. Their hair is mostly seaweed now, hanging wetly down to cover their face. Their remaining eye is a milky pale blue, a faint opaque whiteness over the pupil. Still, there is life. Their hands appear claw-like where in death the skin has retracted, been peeled back from nails grown long and thick and dark. Barnacles grow on their skin. Most are dead, though there seems to leak from them a constant stream of seawater, seeping through their pores as sweat does for those of us alive. But where does it come from? They have never been observed drinking.
Their vocal chords have atrophied, and they cannot produce much sound. Fine motor skills have returned somewhat with practise, and though fluent sign language might require too much precision, their writing by hand has improved. If a waterproof keyboard can be acquired that might help ease communication as fine motor skills slowly improve.
Their movements are slow, slightly uncoordinated. Not quite shambling like a zombie, but unsteady, as if muscle and tendon and bone no longer remains connected quite right. Or perhaps the nerves through which the signals are sent are somewhat eroded. Still, preliminary observations and interactions indicate they remain capable of language, of complex thought and emotion and reason. They cannot explain to me why they remain alive, nor what prompted them to at last make their way up from the ocean floor where they lay after perishing in a shipwreck. They cannot tell me their name, nor what manner of creature they are. Something, perhaps, reanimated by the sea?
The deep wound to the back of their head, which is the likely cause of death, though drowning can not be ruled out, has never closed. It remains a dark and bloody hole, and should have caused irreparable damage to their occipital lobe and cerebellum. Small shells grow along the rim. They seem to thrive despite being in the dry air.
They appear to suffer from a form of selective retrograde amnesia. They cannot tell me their name, nor their age, nor the names of their family members, but they can describe parts of their childhood. They can remember being on a ship. They know that is where it happened. (note: may relate to case #43-5)
