JF Ptak Science Books

Bombing Britain--Maps of the Attack Against the U.K. from the German Side, 1940

JF Ptak Science Books  (an earlier post edited and expanded)

It is essential to look at objects from alternative angles, especially in science, in order to determine the correctness, or fitness, of a finding, or opinion.  Even when consolidating data or evidence regarding the confirmation of an established bit,  you may very well find other strands of loose data that could help illuminate even a well established or iconic societal “given”.

That the war was not going well for the Allies in September 1940 is an understatement—and the chief allies at this point excluded the United States, happily now recovering from the Depression, and still a full 14 months away from entering the war. 

What is very weird to me is that after having looked at every issue of LIFE magazine at least three times  from the start to the end of World War II, that there are more advertisements using war images than there are images of the war itself.  This actually continues into the spring of 1942, when LIFE got really busy, the war got really messy, and people started really dying.  And frankly even the coverage of Pearl Harbor in no way lived up to what I thought the coverage of a photo-magazine like LIFE would be. This is not a scientific study.  It just strikes me as odd, or propagandizing, that there should be such relatively scant, or undervalued, coverage of the fighting when sanitized images of that same fighting were being used to sell socks and shaving cream and cigarettes and such.  I understand the power of hearts-and-minds campaigns, but this seemed so amateurish, boorish even, that it just didn’t approach the level of a psychological ploy to pacify an American public that had virtually no interest in attending the European Theatre. 

On the Possible Delusion of the Inhumanity of Poison Gas, 1921

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2171

Herbert Quick did a fair amount of thinking about the military use of poison gas, and it winds up, in the final analysis, thinking that it was tolerable.  What About Chemical Warfare? (published by the Newspaper Enterprises Association in 1921) is certainly a possible title for a Duck-and-Cover A-Bomb or You and Your Hormones kind of film.   But Mr. Quick took the slow boat around his issue, thinking about it a little long and out loud, before coming to his final conclusion in the chapter titled "Gas Warfare Cheapest and Most Effective Arm of Defense".

He points out the enormous impact in the war effort that relatively small chemical corps played in WWI--something on the order of hundreths of one percent of all serving soldiers were employed in the combined chemical corps, saying "how small a body to produce such great results!" Which is true, assuming that by "great" he meant 'widespread', though it is unclear exactly what he was talking about.

Nr. Quick does make a case for poison gas being not so inhuman as presented by most civilized people, pointing out both its high quick-death rate and survivability/recovery rates, which seems to be giving/taking at the same time. No matter:  "But woe to the army or nation that does not keep up with the times.  The Angel of Death will breathe in their faces" he writes. 

The author also warns that though Germany was "stripped" of her war-making capacities, he thought it was not so of the industries necessary to produce poison gas. He points out that Germany can produce these munitions in secret, and that if any "militaristic nation conquers the world in the future", it will be through the use of the poison gas it developed in secret. 

Defense was also important:  "in the absence of efficient defense worked out beforehand, our great cities might be wiped out with gas bombs dropped from aircraft".  Mr. Quick believes that protecting cities is possible, writing simply "preparation will prevent such a crisis".  Indeed.  Unfortunately no ideas about this defensive posture were forthcoming, though he did bring himself around to writing about gas as a defensive tool.  Against looters. And rioters. And snipers.  "Gas puts the sniper in the power of his enemy" Quick writes, using the Marine action in Vera Cruz, Mexico, as a good example of where gas ("gas grenades") would have come in handy.

The bottom line is of course the bottom line, practically stating that poison gas as a weapon was indisputably more cost-conscious than anything else, by far, each dollar spent on chemical warfare being worth "from three to five hundred for the army".  Poison gas services Quick says should be pursued, because "gas warfare cannot be stopped until all war is stopped".

Gas warfare "gives the educated, intelligent nations the advantages over the people of lower civilizations".

"When both sides are prepared it is much less inhumane than war with bullets and high explosives; but it means horrible annihilation to the army which is unprepared."

It is an interesting exercise to replace "poison gas" with other types of weapons, just to see how it reads.

Mr. Quick was up and down in his treatment of poison gas and war, though almost entirely down.  One thing he didn't see, that no one saw, really, was the use of a particular gas that was used to destroy millions of people, and which was developed quite in the open in Germany for many years, used for killing rats.  The Nazis simply used it instead on people.  No one saw Zyklon-B coming, and no one could have, even when they did.

A Classic Depression-era Photo Printed on 180-Year-Old-Paper

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2170

I've experimented a little in presenting photographic images on a slightly different medium, and the results are interesting,  Take for example Arthur Rothstein's classic 1936 "Father and Son" (actually, the "son" should be a plural, as there are two little kids rushing in the photo): I've used a 25 meg file and printed (lasered) rather small on a piece of antique tissue-guard paper--the paper, from 1830, is fantastically light, yet very strong for its remarkable thinness. The result of the modern, small Rothstein printed on the 180-year-old paper looks "believable" in its own odd way.

The manipulated-printed effort:

And the instantly recognized original:

Mr. Mencken, Unterrified Jeffersonism, and the Anarchist

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The long-spirit anarchist (and "Unterrified Jeffersonian") Benjamin R. Tucker (1854-1939) wrote  "The Attitude of Anarchism toward Industrial Combination" in 1926, but we see it here printed in Detroit (by Lawrence Labadie) in 1933.

It is interesting to see on the inside of this tiny pamphlet that the anarchist Tucker's work was sent to H.L. Mencken, as a gift from the printer.  It wouldn't stay long in Mr. Mencken's possession, as he sent it (along with a number of other works by Tucker that I can't lay my hands on at the moment) to the Library of Congress in July 1934 (and coming into my possession as part of a purchase of "the Pamphlet Collection" 65 years later.).  I'm  not so sure about what Mr. Mencken would have thought of most of it, only that he didn't keep it for long.  Despite what might seem to be his "Tory Anarchism" and general oppositionist stances, left and right, whatever they might have meant at the time, it looks like he received the pamphlet and sent it on its merry way to join its brethren in Mr. Jefferson's library. 

The full text of the pamphlet in an earlier version is found here.

 

The String of Empire

JF Ptak Science Books    

It is astonishing sometimes to think about how much was accomplished with so little.  This photograph, found in the 6 June 1908 issue of the Illustrated London News, entitled "The Threads of Every Man's Maze:  Arranging Railway Time-Tables" (sub-titled "the ingenious system of threads which secure the perfect working of a great railway system") is just such a case in point of wonder.  Each section of the board represents one hour, top to bottom; these are further subdivided by thinner lines representing 5-minute intervals; the horizontal lines representing the distances between stations.  And the guys in the foreground are keeping the whole thing up-to-minute, using string and tacks, running the rails of Great Britain.

This was the British Empire at about its loftiest heights, with a spectacular internal railroading system, kept all in line and on time and correct with the help of heavy thumbs.  Can you think of a better way to display all of this complex data (with 1910 technology)  in real-time so that it is all intelligible--and to be so instantly?  I can't.  This was just sheer, simple, brilliance.

(I know, I know, this is actually "thread", but so it goes.)  If you elongated and strengthened this concept just a bit you'd come up with rope and wire, and chains--the most simple metallic form of which was used by surveyors for hundreds of years to help map our earth.  And I won't even get close to the String Theory stuff here, or stringed instruments--but if I did, I would want to talk a little about perhaps the ultimate string/cosmology image in the history of science, which would be Robert Fludd and his fantastical thought-experiment  called "Monochordum mundi". from his Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia, printed in 1617.

Fludd makes an elaborate and beautiful stab at understanding the deepest aspects of an imagined supramusical relationship between the order and rationality and mathematical aspects of music and the functioning of the universe—based on sound itself.  These ideas come up time and time again, most visually pleasing in Fludd, but most dramatically argued by Johannes (Harmonicae Mundi, "Music of the Spheres") Kepler.  But Fludd trumps with god’s graphical intervention.

The hand of god makes an appearance here as it adjusts the magic monochord of creation--a Pythagorean monochord of two octaves which are then divided into harmonic intervals.  But god's hand is definitely there, doing some sort of adjustment (or perhaps even holding the slipping peg in place?), which is actually a little bit late in the history of the mechanical universe being turned by the hand of the creator, with the hand actually depicted doing the job.  In general the hand stopped making appearances by this point in the history of science, but did manage to linger on in the work of Fludd.

Rising to a Higher State of Misery: Books Read by Frankenstein's "Monster"

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2169

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay

To mould Me man? Did I solicit thee

From darkness to promote me? John Milton, Paradise Lost (X.743–5)

The animated human created by Victor Frankenstein in 20-year-old Mary Shelley's anonymously published Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus was a far more intelligent being than was ever portrayed in the many movies that made the novel famous in the 20^th century. “Frankenstein” refers to Dr. Victor, not the creation, who refers to himself as the Adam of his maker's labors (and then later as Victor's Fallen Angel), while elsewhere in the book he is called “it”, as well as “being”, "creature", “daemon”, “Fiend, “monster”, “vile insect” and “wretch”,  among other adjectival variants. 

[Illustration by Theodor von Holst for the 1831 edition of Shelley's book.]

“Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous."

Mostly the creation is referred to as a “monster”--the word being used 35 times, mostly in reference to Victor's animated man.

It is difficult to refer to the creation as a “monster” once you get to know him a little—he is exceptionally smart, teaching himself to read, and then reading difficult and complex works with deep understanding, which is hardly something that is expected from what Boris Karloff gave to us.

 

The Square Root of Beautiful

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2367

The author of this manuscript, Charles Fisher, took a solitary pleasure in calculating the square roots of numbers from 2  to 589, not bothering to write down the 24 perfect squares to 576.  (The sqrt being r² = x for every non-negative real number x.) From the few bits that I have checked the man seems to have done a good job back there in the 1830’s. 

I cannot determine where this book was written or who Mr. Fisher was, though it is possible that he was a (Baptist) Minister from the few short textual notes that pop up here and there.  

His work is pretty elegant.  Take for example his solution (and proof) for the square root (hereafter sqrt(x)) 309,

which the calculator living under this page says is 17.578395831246947    Mr. Fisher’s answer is 17 10/17 = 799/17=89401/989=309 100/989, and after some more involved arithmetic comes t the lovely proof number of   

4121989960986322995025 /13339773336525317136 or

309.00000000000000000007496379247

Which is getting pretty close.  

The only note that Mr. Fisher makes on his calculations is for the sqrt(193), which he notes as “the hardest number to find the approximate root of any between 1 and 200. I have found it after repeated trials and have this evening wrote it in as above. March 1^st, 1833. CF.”

The Benevolent Aid and Burial Society (1937)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2167

There is something terribly American, full of hope, and trust, and celebration in this anniversary celebration pamphlet for the city of Mound Bayou, Mississippi--an African American town founded in 1887.  The Souvenir Program, for the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the town (July 11-17, 1937), is filled with town history, and advertisements, and photographs. 

[Souvenir Program of the 50th Anniversary of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, July 11-17, 1937.  Shelby, Miss. : Press of J.W. Covington,   12x9 inches, 59pp, illustrations, with articles, and numerous local ads.  This was formerly part of the Library of Congress Pamphlet Collection, coming to the library form the White House (so marked on the back of the cover, stamped "By Transfer/the White House/August 17, 1937").]  

Isaiah T. Montgomery was one of the founders of Mound Bayou, clearing out the bottomlands in the wilderness of northwest Mississippi, the town being populated by Freedmen.  But here at the time of the anniversary, in 1937, with the failure of cotton prices and the Depression being at its height or depth, the majority of the people living in Mound Bayou were sharecroppers, with most property lost.

Tik-Tok of the Intertube // How Many Triangles are in the Web?

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

Ted Nelson had a lot of ideas about computers, though not that many are remembered today, in spite of a bunch of them being pretty smart. (He coined the words "hypertext" and maybe "hyperlink", for example.)  In any event there's this little diagram of the possibilities of his "world wide network", which I think no doubt is one of the earliest "maps" of the yet-to-exist internet. 

[Picture source:  Ted Nelson, Dream Machines (1974) via Alex Wright, Glut, Mastering Information Through the Ages (2007), p 215.] 

It is also interesting to see that the frontis illustration for his book uses Tik-tok, a metal/machine character from a series of books by (Oz) L. Frank Baum, this one Tik-tok of Oz (1914).

The Pulpy Flying TubePunk of TomorrowLand

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2166

Following this blog's series on the History of Holes and the History of Dots will be a new series:  the History of Tubes, the first note of which is on the flying tubes of TomorrowWorld. Today's installment is a simple picture post:

[Source: http://www.dailygalaxy.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/07/17/science_fiction_science_fact.jpg] 

 
[Source: http://lh6.ggpht.com/_hVOW2U7K4-M/ST2rP9fpFfI/AAAAAAAAugY/u95RIMSHH9g/s1600/34754tutfgjdgdf.jpg] 
 

[Source:"http://androvillans.files.wordpress.com/2011/ 4/b2-astounding_science_fiction_1938071.jpg]

 

 

 

[Source: http://static.flickr.com/100/258214584_3ce3697ab2.jpg] 

 

[Source:http://static.flickr.com/59/188844208_60a18e94d7.jpg]

[Source:http://lh5.ggpht.com/abramsv/R4fcwUKUlTI/AAAAAAAADBI/Xu7s8ESZMyM/s1600/tow_1940summer.jpg]

 

Labor Unions as Red-Commie Battalions of Death (1940)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2165

Representative Clare E. Hoffman wrote (or lent his name to) this insane and blistering attack on the CIO (the other half of the AFL-CIO) which was the Congress of Industrial Organizations founded by John L. Lewis in 1928.  Hoffman (1875-1967) was a conservative "Republican" from the 4th District/Michigan, who was pretty much an outsider to either major party, making and destroying his own roads and bridges in a long Congressional career. He was a recognized anti-Semite, a race-baiter, a leading exponent in the Impeach Roosevelt movement (publishing and distributing by Congressional franking privileges "Roosevelt is Judas"), and a person who supported and spoke for a number of "isolationist" and national socialist-supporting groups.  He saw Soviets/Communists everywhere, including his campaign against polio immunization, which he feared was too heavily influence by commies and Jews.  

In addition to saving America from Communists and Jews, saving America for the "true American", Hoffman was strongly aligned with the Constitutional Educational League, which published this pamphlet. The CEL was indicted in 1942 with 27 other groups for sedition and conspiracy and working to aid Nazi Germany and the Axis Powers--which is a tough business, but not too tough for Hoffman.  The CEL and Hoffman and the associated ilk and cancers were associated with a panoply of other Isolationist/Fascist groups operating int he U.S. during the war including such wincingly-named groups as the Christian Mobilizer, Christocrats, American Destiny, National Workers League, Black Legion (perhaps the most infamous of these groups), National American, Silver Shirts (started by bizarro local boy Pelley and very nasty), Citizens USA, and a host of others.  And of course America First, which may have been the most well known of these groups, having the famous affiliation and support of Charles Lindbergh (until Pearl Harbor at which point the Colonel back away).  

Getting back to the pamphlet--it has the feel of old bad fetish porn, and makes endless claims that the trade unions were thuggy Communist--and even worse, "red Communist"-- and would wind up controlling and destroying the U.S., putting the country under control of the U.S.S.R.  The aim seems to be equating the CIO with Communism, and so to stop Communism you must stop the CIO, the great destroyers of the American way.

I can't help but seeing many similarities between some current right-wing attacks against unions and pieces of the Hoffman piece--we'll see how silly/abhorrent these claims really are with historical perspective in another few decades.

Sources:  Ellen Parsons, "Anti-Jewish Manifestations" in American Jewish Yarbook, 1945/6, pp 135-143; Glen Yeadon, Nazi Hydra in America, p. 151.

An Aggressive Cover Illustration for Sputnik (1957)

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This cover illustration for Alte Welt und Neue Sterne ("Old World / New Star") really does break through the headlines and into its own space.  It is a DDR publication and although my copy has two outer wrappers for decoration and title it has no title page--the celebration skips the necessaries and gets right into the forward and then the crux of the matter, most of which was a high-principled statement of accomplishment and a low-dark anti-American humor in having "lost" the space race.  (While Eisenhower golfs, the Soviet Union has launches a new moon, losing not only the apce race but prestige as well--one cartoon places a joyous Khrushchev successfully courting a young woman labelled "Lesser Countries" with a beaming gesture to an orbiting Sputnik as Uncle Sam reels on his heels and drops his going-courtin' flowers in the process. "Wer sonst koennte dir einen Mond schenken" ("Who else can give you a moon?"), proudly offered as commentary that had appeared in the New York Times.

In any event, I just wanted to share the design, which is pretty strong. (The pamphlet is undated but I suspect it was in print immedaitely following the 4 October 1957 launch.)

The Speed of Stuff, 1: the Speed of Bad Ideas

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2164

Johannes Mueller (1801-1858), a heavyweight physiologist/anatomist and idea-adventuring-synthesizer, had the idea that the speed of nerve impulses in humans was about 11,000,000 mps—that's somewhat like the Enterprise's Warp 2, almost two orders of magnitude faster than the speed of light. At about the same time the remarkable and thorough Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894), a universal knowledge guy who knew pretty much everything, a polymath's polymath, had a different idea about this speed, performing a series of elegant experiments and showing the speed to be about 150-300mph.

[This is a detail from an image by the great Santiago Ramon y Cajal ( 1852-1934), who drew the first accurate picture of nerve cells in the cerebellum (found in one convolution of a mammalian cerebellum), which helped formulate his theory that the basic structural unit of the nervous system as the neuron.] 

At the time of Mueller's appraisal the speed of the nerve impulse seemed an unknowable entity. I wonder about other unknowables like this and what their estimated speeds might be that might put us more in touch with the major domo Mueller's imaging the impossibility of knowing this reclusive and invisible speed?

What is the speed of attribution? The speed of recognition? Of growth? Of absent love resuscitated? The speed of caring and not so? The speed of being in a space that you want to be in? The speed of imagined motion, of a bending cane, of finding the perfect broken seashell?

 Perhaps though the most interesting thing about the idea of speed is the speed of ideas.

An Alphabet of the Suggested Speed of Various Types of Ideas

 Abstract idea: 35 mph

Bad ideas: 375 mph

Cryptic ideas: 50 mph

Dangerous ideas: 250 mph

Envious ideas: 350 mph

Fanciful and farcical ideas: 100 mph

Great ideas that are not Your's: 28 mph

Half-an-idea: 150 mph and a buck-two-eighty

Ideas that are not ideas: 200 mph

Jokingly-said ideas that are taken for real ideas: 200 mph

Knowledgeable but sniffily restrictive ideas: 30 mph

Lyrical ideas told in a non-lyrical way: 31.23 mph

Mincing, broken tea-cup weak-tea ideas: 4 mph

Nonsensical ideas: 150 mph

Overheard-from-someone-else's-cellphone idea: 300 mph

Practical ideas that have no direct application: 45 mph

Quixotic, queenly-quizzical, and not understandable ideas: 125 mph

Random idea: 125 mph

Salacious ideas: 450 mph

Tiresome ideas that are really notions: 20 mph

Underthought and underwhelming ideas: 55 mph

Vexating, poorly-ventilated, porous ideas of multiple misunderstandings: 44 mph

Wonderful ideas that belong to someone else: 4 mph

Zealous and impudent ideas: 75mph

Of course I've had some fun with this idea—but it came to me in a flash (at 250 mph) so I went ahead with it. And possibly it delivers some sense of the impossibility of knowing something that even the leading lights of those fields sensed as being unknowable.

The Beauty of Pi, Times Two (and More)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post 

Very little is pretty as pie, especially when there's more than one.  Double that for pi.  I happened to be breezing through an 1829 book of mathematical formulas by C.P. Biel and found this lovely section on an extended computation of pi.It occurs on page 38, and carries pi out to 155 places--which for the time was very significant. (Pi was computed to 9 places  by Francoise Viete in 1579; 15 places by Adriaan van Roonan, 1593; 32 by Ludolph van Ceulen in 1596; 35 by Willebrord Snell in 1621; 38 by Christoph Grienberger; 75 by Abraham Sharp in 1699; 100 by John Machin in 1706; 137 by Jurj Vega in 1794; and 152 by Legendre in 1794.)

In any event, it is a lovely display.

And so to for the multiplication of pi:

A Note on the Finite Infinite Library: McBorges' and Influenced Forgetting

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2163

Jorge Borges wrote a powerful and wonderful short story called The Library of Babel, where the universe is basically composed of books the center of which is an anti-black-book-hole. I was thinking about this in a waiting room a few hours ago, and thinking of the Infinite in general, all of which somehow led me to the Finite Library and Forgetting. 

["The Librarian", is a 1566 work by Giueseppe Archimbaldo, 1526-1593, who painted incredible portraits such as this at a time when expressioin in this form would have been extremely uncommon--his semi-Boschian sense and image palette makes him the Vermeer of constructed object painting, I think.]

In a country set into thin mists, compulsive and repetitive feeding instruments were replaced with Ideaoterias. Rather than an endless maps of interwoven McDonald's restaurants set at predictable intervals, there are libraries.

1. Each library contains 10,000 books.

2. All 10,000 books are the same from library to library.

3. Each location must organize their 10,000 volumes differently, each grouping identifying ideas inherent in the contents of each volume, in support or negation of one another, arranged with other books that were complimentary, or supplementary, or antagonistic, or worse, or better.

    4. The organization of thought contained in those 10,000 volumes would be different from location to location, the librarian-explorers having organized the library so that the books were freed into new spaces.

    5. The number of books is finite; the infinite aspect is the continuous shifting of material and the expanding structure for the display of ideas. The simplest aspect of this arrangement makes it possible for every book to actually be seen. (Even in cursory browsing the mind has certain expectations of what-come-next when browsing a shelf, sweeping past things that have been swept-past before, rejected or unneeded for whatever reason. The deeper aspect is for the association of ideas by the placement of book, the arrangements suggesting themselves for the reader to have a new experience witn an old idea or book or set of books.

    6. The McBorges' Library is a learning, memory, and forgetting experience.

    7. Forgetting may be a key to making these libraries an infinite experience: re-re-re-etc.-learning does not imply necessarily that the learned bits will be cumulative, and useful. Maybe the best we can do is have learned and re-learned bits in a new context, making it possible to have more ideas; this means that a certain amount of forgetting is necessary, where that forgetting unleashes existing associations of ideas.

    8. At McBorges', forgetting is an important aspect of learning, but really only in regard to what it would take to open the possibilities for new ideas by rearrangement of old relationships. The palaces of memory work hand-in-hand with the Palaces of Forgetting.