JF Ptak Science Books

Red Sky in the Renassiance: the Reverse of Geometry

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 913

What if our eyes worked in the “opposite” way?  What if we somehow broadcast the lines of reality from our eyes¹ rather than receive photonic emissions from the physical world, that we didn’t specify the wavelength and frequency of light, and that somehow electromagnetic rumblings in the “visual range” didn’t apply to our sense of sight?

This would certainly make for an interesting  existence if somehow the elements around us weren’t necessarily so.  Perhaps this is sort of replacement reality is just what has been going on in the entire history of humans, altering the landscape to make it more suitable for our existence, a long history of painting the physical landscape with something more “suitable”, an individualized creation. 

This all came up wondering about this fantastic sky, produced 475 years before non-representational art and 455 years before Gauguin started applying big blankets of red² :  it seems to me in a distant impression that it is a representation of vision that is more a projector than a camera..  The end result of this emission and wayward thought is the fabulous red sky in the painting Nativity by Master Francke³ (ca. 1424-1436) is a fantastic red sky with lustrous stars.

The painting is otherwise filled with the common reliables of Renaissance iconography concerning the nativity:  the place of “birth” (a stable or barn-like building, also sometimes appearing as a classical ruin or cave), a flock of sheep, a stand of trees, and the watch sensate gazes of the near by beasts.  Mary is ecstatic in the same ways that Joseph is usually not—to me, he usually seems pretty detached from the whole deal, lost in another space.  The baby Christ is again just a little man (and not a baby) laying there on the barren ground.  [I’ve wondered about Joseph’s detachment:  perhaps the whole scene is nothing but mysterious, a complexity far removed from his reach and understanding, a notion of an act that is so phenomenal that there is no retrievable reaction for it, and so he looks away.  Later on in the history of Mary and Joseph, and deep into the 19^th century when the Immaculate Conception—that is, the sexless conception of Mary the mother of Christ which she would later accomplish for her own baby—the issue of Joseph’s own virginity comes up, mounting the confusion no doubt in Joseph’s already-full head.]

But back to the sky:  certainly skies and backgrounds of pure gold and blue painted by the masters in Sienna and Florence abound during this time, but red is quite unusual.  The sky is accented by the terrific red of the wings of the angels and more softly so in the hair of the (long-fingered) Madonna. 

There is also the issue of the hole in the sky, revealing the large-handed Creator with glimpses of the alternate, higher, existence visible in the background, a taste of the alpha (or omega?) part of the long arch of Earth-borne humanity.

Notes

1.The discussion of optics and vision is one of the most spectacular conversations ever held in the history of science and philosophy (along with "time", "motion" and "the void".  I think that Leonardo would've come closest in relatively-modern times to understanding vision if he had the real capacity of dissecting the eye (which in spite of many approaches to experiment) would always go flat, leaving him with an unsatisfying mess.

In Aristotle's Physics (Book II, Part II) we find the following fascinating thought:

"Similar evidence is supplied by the more physical of the branches of mathematics, such as optics, harmonics, and astronomy. These are in a way the reverse of geometry. While geometry investigates physical lines but not qua physical, optics investigates mathematical lines, but qua physical not qua mathematical"

A classical position of the emission theory of optics is stated by Hero in his Definitions:

"Optics does not deal with physical questions and does not study whether given rays flowing out from the eyes go forth to the boundaries of objects or whether images that are detached go forth from corporeal objects [and] enter the eye along a rectilinear path or whether the intervening air is stretched or contracted by the ray-like pneuma from the eye. It is only concerned whether, at each reception (of an image) the right direction of movement or tension is maintained as well as the requirement that the convergence to a point occurs at an angle when objects are seen that are larger or smaller than the eye."

(My thanks to Dr. Kim Veltman for these quotes from her Continuity and Discovery in Optics and Astronomy, Studies on Leonardo da Vinci http://www.sumscorp.com/books/contin/title.html)

2. I had Gauguin's 1888 "After the Sermon/Jacob Wrestling the Angel" in mind for an example of this.

3. Master Francke active (c. 1424 – 36 ), Nativity, in the Kunsthalle, Hamburg; oil on oak, 39x35 inches. Hamburg, Kunsthalle. “German painter who worked in Hamburg, where in 1424 he painted a huge altarpiece for the company of merchants who traded with England, the so-called ‘Englandfahrer Altar’, originally placed in their chapel in the Johanniskirche (remnants in Hamburg, Kunsthalle). When closed, the double-winged altarpiece displayed four scenes from the life of S. Thomas Becket, the patron saint of the company, above four scenes from the life of the Virgin (e.g. Nativity;). Opened, the altarpiece showed scenes from the Passion of Christ. Francke was a leader of the northern German version of International Gothic. He had close links with French book illumination (he may have worked in Paris for some time) and the paintings of the Rhineland, especially those of Conrad van Soest , though it is not known where he received his training.”

Other Nativity scenes as follows:

A Mile-High Pile of Wood--Graphical Display of Quantitative Data.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 913

Continuing a long, developing thread on the graphical display of quantitative data--and especially that which uses man-made objects for comparison—is this interesting bit from a Romanian mining publication from 1933.

The huge mound next to the Eiffel Tower shows the consumption of wood in Romania over a ten year period, a stack of wood 700  metres long and 1500 metres high.  Evidently this wall has only the most rudimentary depth of a metre, as the legend reads that the volume of the woodpile is 1,050,000 metres cubed, which is the same as its square area.  So somebody missed something, here, though the artist did supply some nice shadowing.

Just above it appeared this comparison for the amount of oil consumed over the same ten year period

I’m not sure why this comparison was being made.  This does come in the interwar period which saw a great expansion in Romanian territory and a vast modernization effort following the country’s devastating experience in WWI. Maybe it was illustrating modernization from wood-burning power/heating sources to oil-based. I really don't know--I just liked the Eiffel Tower being dwarfed by a massively tall and impossibly skinny woodpile.

When a Compliment is Not: Newton and Hooke and the "Shoulders of Giants"

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 912

I was tooling looking for vision quotes and came upon this by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (an unusual stomping ground for me) from The Friend (published in 1828):

"The dwarf sees farther than the giant, when he has the giant's shoulder to mount on."

This made me think of the over-quoted sentiment quoted again by Isaac Newton

"What Descartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways, and especially in taking the colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."

Newton wrote this in a letter (5 February 1676) to the immensely creative workhorse Robert Hooke1.  He was a tireless, relentless observer and experimenter, who lost little effort in a stranded idea and pursued interesting and problematic questions relentlessly.  More than others too he chased his won glory—minor but long and insistent—the years of which wore thin on many people in the scientific community.  But there were many characteristics of the man that made him not quite so lovable and endearing—not that Newton was any of those things, as he was not, but if you are going to be a secondary luminary to a super nova you’ve got to have something else going for you that the other man doesn’t have—sharing, helpful, greatly generous—to get you into the long pre-dusty pages of history. Also it would’ve helped if Hooke chose his battles with a little more aplomb and ingenuity—the war which began in 1672 with Newton went very badly for Hooke and followed him to the grave (and far beyond).  Newton and Hooke had many disputes—most notably in optics—basically because Hooke pursed Newton (among many others) for expropriating his ideas.  Hooke was over the line on this and probably pushed the point too far—Newton was enormously annoyed by this and other Hooke contacts and wasted no effort in trying to pay Hooke back the favor over the years.  Newton was famously sharp and could fashion that intelligence and wit into a terrifically nasty tool against those who bothered him.

And so back to the “shoulders” letter. This always struck me as a bit too melodramatic for a Newton, and also a little too congratulatory for a field that he basically owned, especially since he was a towering egoist (and not without cause).  But he did pay Descatres (“des Cartes” in the original) a compliment; though I could not at all think of Newton referring to the dreaded Hooke as one of the giants’ shoulders he was standing upon.  Newton’s reference to “giants” might also have been a swipe at Hooke’s physical stature, which was terribly slight, small and crooked.  SO I think that Newton was referring to Descartes, and decidedly not Hooke.

So this semi-ubiquitous scientific laudatory quote is perhaps not quite so.  Kinda like the very well known painting by William Blake featuring Newton as a naked geometer, figuring out the world, a color-tone praise of the great physicist.  Or perhaps not.  Blake I think simply didn’t like Newton, didn’t care for the scientist taking away the mystery of the world that Blake loved so much—especially in regards to color, which Blake needed to stay interpretative and mysterious.  Newton took part of that away, and I think Blake exercised a little payback in his artwork. 

It seems to me that if one looked at the “shoulder” quote and the Blake artwork as works that were insults and not praises, they can be easily seen that way.  Its all a matter of perspective.

Notes

1. The 28-year old Hooke published the results in a gorgeous and revolutionary book, Micrographia (a lovely e-text edition appears at Gutenberg, here) in 1665, which became an instant best seller and highly praised and valued. (Samuel Pepys, perhaps among the shiniest stars whose imprimatur was like a royal blessing, said the book (was) "the most ingenious book that I ever read in my life.") There is no telling what the people of the mid-17^th century thought of seeing such incredible discoveries in the little semi-invisible stuff that made up their normal, daily lives.  The only thing that somewhat equates to this would be if the first images of the Hubble were those of Earth-bound objects whose detail had previously been unknown.  Hooke’s observations and drawings of things like the common flea were just an astonishment—that such a creature of “low order” could have such intricate detail and design was a complete revelation.  The drawings of the fly's eye, too, was an inescapable wonder, an incredible object to consider as having any detail pre-microscope, and then revealed to have unimaginable design and elegance. 

Missing Pieces of Women: Pope Joan & the Proper Popular Girl of "The Ladies’ Home Journal"

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 910

Listening to these dreadful stories this morning on NPR about the Vatican’s relations with the Roman Jewish community and the abortive WWII papacy of Pope Pius XII—the papacy of blank and missing compassion—I thought about the missing Papacy of Pope Joan.  Whether or not she existed is a question of debate; whether she was a pope or not is perhaps even less debatable.  What seems not impossible though is the ability of a large institution like the Catholic Church to make the entire issue of unwanted history or legacy to go away. 

The historicity of this papacy is long and shows the murkiness of the earliest writers on Joan. She was supposed to have served as pope between Leo IV and Benedict III around the year 850.  The fuller versions of her history turn up in the 14^th century, although the earliest mentions of a female bishop of Rome go back to the 9^th century—Joan remains unnamed though until the 13^th century when Martin of Opava’s Chronicon Pontificum et Imperatorum¹(referring to Joan as “John Anglicus” or “John of Mainz”) does so for the first time.

Joan escapes the Middle Ages with a little flair, but doesn’t do so well in the Renaissance.  As a Missing Piece in the history of the Papacy she turns up not-so-well represented:  for example, she is seen here looking good but turning up bad overall as the Whore of Babylon².  She was treated as a disgrace, and impostor, someone who demeaned the Catholic institution by her sex and deception, though god knows that the history of the papacy is filled with horror stories³ that far exceed the reach of mere deception.

So I was thinking about the piecing-together of the Pope Joan jigsaw and remembered an actual “womanly” jigsaw that could actually be pieced together.  This bit came together as a result of a post I did here just two days ago (What Goes Into Making Human Robot Girls, 1941), and was one of a series of intolerably heavy eight-page pamphlets cementing the structure of female social intercourse at the hands of the magazine The Ladies’ Home Journal. 

One of these publications—hardly a pamphlet per se, just a folded 11x8 inch sheet of heavy stock—came without a title, presenting itself as a puzzle. The puzzle pieces are parts of two women, “Miss Popular” and “Miss Unpopular”: the reader was to take the publication, cut out the pieces, and reassemble them into hidden role models, with phrases describing each on the back of each puzzle piece, all done without the slightest possible understanding of metaphor or irony.

Miss Popular phrases/descriptors: live wire, plenty of push, wide awake, snappy looker, dependable, genuine, secret keeper, on-her-toes, spick and span, light hearted, all-around-student, straight-shooter, gossip scorner, sympathetic, cheerer-upper, sparkler.

Miss Unpopular’s phrases/descriptors: glory grabber, sour puss, cheater, sob-sister, snooty-snob, wet-blanket, borrower, prissy prig, sharp tongue, gory gossiper, clothes dummy, iceberg, sly and slippery, jellyfish, sticky-sweet, soft soaper (?) and of course fast and loose.

And so girls—or young women—picking up this publication in 1941 were expected to cut this thing up and piece together the proper (paper) role model using the reinforcing traits of meager acceptance printed on the back of the puzzle piece. And poor Pope Joan, whether she was real or not, whether she was imagined or sunk purposefully away into the Pandora’s sisters’ boxes of forced forgetfulness—it really doesn’t matter—is just another woman or part of woman’s puzzle whose blank or missing piece has been extruded, forced into a form more friendly to a world less friendly to women. 

Notes

1.According to the Chronicon:  “John Anglicus, born at Mainz, was Pope for two years, seven months and four days, and died in Rome, after which there was a vacancy in the Papacy of one month…” [See continued reading section below for more]

2. Babylon was the representation of the seat of evil on the Earth.  From the “Book of Revelation” (17:3–4): "And I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast, full of names of blasphemy with seven heads and ten horns. The woman was garbed in purple and scarlet, and gilded with gold, gems, and pearls, and bearing a golden goblet in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication."

3. Borgia and the Medicis not being the least of the story: see E.R. Chamberlin’s The Bad Popes, (1969)

History of Holes 12: Caves in mid-Renaissance Art

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 909

“When [the soul] is firmly fixed on the domain where truth and reality shine resplendent it apprehends and knows them and appears to possess reason, but when it inclines to that region which is mingled with darkness, the world of becoming and passing away, it opines only and its edge is blunted, and it shifts its opinions hither and thither, and again seems as if it lacked reason.”  Plato, The Republic book. VI, 508d

Plato dipped deep into the myth/metaphor/parable/analogy/allegory of the cave, contrasting it with the allegory of the sun, discussing the pursuit of knowledge real and not-so.

I like the idea of the half-displayed, semi-schematic, fade-away disposition of the cave and how painters dealt with them and their hidden contents in early Renaissance art.

Its difficult to show a cave, a dark hole (occurring in all rock types and topographic situations, btw) that really hadn’t been dealt with scientifically yet—even if humans had been using them one way or another for thousands of years. 

I’ve noticed these images time in and time out, and I’ve not really saved them, or at least I haven’t segregated the odd etched or engraved images, though they are all here somewhere, so I can add to this post from time to time.  The image that I’ll use tonight comes from Harvard’s Fogg Museum and is the work of the Master of Osservanza (Sienese school, fl 1430-1450, manuscript illustrator).  It is a popular image, “Christ in Limbo”, though of the others working in this genre we see Christ generally at the entrance to a tomb/cave-like place, standing just outside of the doorway (as with Mantegna, Durer, Pacher, Fra Angelico and others). The Master of Osservanza gives us an exquisite cutaway view of the cave of limbo, showing both the outside and the inside, which is an uncommon and beautiful perspective.

I should add that the tearingly odd "Saint Anthony Abbot Tempted by a Heap of Gold", also painted by the Master of Osservanza (ca. 1435) depicts the least-likely-of-all-saints-to-be-tempted-by-gold reacting in horror to, well, nothing.  Nothing at all. We see him reacting to what used to be there, but which for some reason was removed, painted-over at some dim point in the dusty past, for reasons that I do not know.  (And so the painting could easily move into my Blank and Empty Things series.) But the desert landscape is so sparse and the sky so surreal with bent clouds that it is easy today to overlook the gold entirely. 

[I know there's SO much more to this business with the caves--I just wanted to get this post started before it all went down the thought-hole.]

What Goes into Making Human Robot Girls, 1941

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 907

[See the follow-up post "First Thing to Do is to Find Some Men"; How to Get a Boy-date, 1941]

An old friend of mine, Dr. Sam Koslov, was  brilliant, accomplished and polymathic, with great senses of wonder, inquisitiveness and humor.  He spent many years in research and as a long-time editor at Johns Hopkins APL.  He was a delightful and serious man, though one of the projects he worked on sounded much more like squeaky scifi than pure sci. That was Project Pandora, and science fiction it definitely wasn’t—it was an attempt at a form of control over human behavior via low level microwave radiation¹. 

This came to mind as I was leading through some very low level, high impact behavior control exhibited in a series of social engineering pamphlets published by the Ladies’ Home Journal in the early 1940’s.  It is heartbreaking, really, to think of people like my mother reading these things and being inundated by cultural architecture that left little to the imagination.  It seems so terrifically outrageous in 2010; and of course it makes me wonder about what things that seem so de rigueur today will be the Ladies’ Home Embarrassments of 2050 . 

Granted, nobody's corneas were being shaken loose via this method, but the effect of the sentiments of control in these pamphlets still seem eye-poppingly strangulating.  I’ve included only a few examples here, but there are at least a hundred others to choose from.

Perhaps it was the Date-Rate pamphlet that caused most of my teeth to fall out—it is sheer and painful, offering virtually nothing to the young women reading it and practicing its morality play but gender obedience and servility.

“Did you give him all your attention?” “Did he run things?” “Did you give him a chance to impress you?” “Could you make him laugh?”  It isn’t until the final rating question (#25) that we get to something that opened the possibility of a two-way interest in the relationship, but only barely: “Did you find you liked the same things?”  Its sad, really. 

When I read some of this to my 17-year-old daughter, she just looked at me with an open mouth and eyebrow furrows:  it was simply beyond listening to, for her, and certainly not anywhere near worthy of a response. 

 

Of course this is just the tip of the tip of the tippity tip of the iceberg on the control of social thought and the keeping of the male-dominated social order, and its only one part of a very wide spectrum of overall codifications, much of which seem pretty much left to history within two generations.  

 

Found Absurdist Art: 1950's Mommy Rockets, Flannel Moon Suits & Underwater Firefighters

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 907

I like Found Art categories:  Found Absurdist, Found Surrealist, Found Cubist. This is a vision of art or design produced for something specifically not absurd or surreal or cubist, but once removed from their intended environment and definers, become the thing that was beyond their specified reach.  The following examples are all from the mid-1950's, their sources reprinted below:

 

And this Spongebob-like existence under water, where you can have beaches and surf and fire and etc. at the bottom of the sea:

 

And of course the mom at the modern electric range feeling the birth of some sort of deep outer space astronautical space travel outer  space rocket (though with no visible viewing windows which leads me to believe that perhaps no Outer Space Astronauts were on board):

 

The image sources:

 

Big Planes: Aircraft with Dining Rooms in Their Wings

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 906

Is it just me, or do the rest of you see Cary Grant at a teeny-tiny table when looking at this aircraft? There’s just something so horribly wonderful about the excesses washing over the passengers of high privilege in this airplane.[Source: The Illustrated London News 21 Dec 1929.] 

 

And the airplane has a name—Christmas, named for the man who provided its inspiration, Dr. William Whitney Christmas¹--and was a paper plan to produce the world’s largest airplane.

 

It would’ve been so by leaps and bounds.  The Christmas was to have a 262’ wingspan and a gross weight of 142,000 pounds at the time when one of the largest planes aloft—the Patrician Keystone K-78—had a wingspan of 86’ and carried 18 passenger, 2 pilots and an engineer. It also held the world’s record for hauling the heaviest payload, which for some reason was “33 girls”.  It was bigger still than the largest thing in the air, Lufthansa’s Dornier DO.X –this was an aircraft capable of moving 60-100 passengers (serviced by a crew of 10-14), a flying boat with 12 (Curtiss Conqueror 610hp) engines on wing sections 157’ long. (Was this a mile-a-minute fuel consumer?) The Dornier plane didn’t last long in service due to operating costs (1929 was a bad year to undertake an expense like this, especially in the hyperinflated Germany) and was in an aviation museum by 1934². (This plane—one of three constructed—was destroyed in a RAF bombing raid in 1943.)

Here’s something extraordinary about the Christmas:  it had a dining room (actually, a “dining saloon”) that took up 15% of the plane’s floor plan.  There was also the spacious smoking room, the crew and officer quarters, the machinist’s shop, engine room balconies (?), and of course the staterooms that seem to run along most of the front of the plane. The side elevation shows not very much space at all allotted to what must’ve been some massive engines, seeing as how there’s only two four-blade props. (The small lateral cross section shows two people against the plane for scale—these folks must’ve been giants; I figure they should be a little more than 75% of the manikins.  I make each prop blade to be about 10 foot (?))

As it turns out this aircraft looks a lot like Edmund Rumpler’s³ (1872-1940) giant.  Outfitted with a long row of staterooms along the front edge of the large wing and a huge dining room, it doesn’t seem to be equipped with an area for the engines.  Maybe this was an endemic flaw among older fast-thinkers…  

Notes:

1. Dr. Christmas (1865-1960) was the third American to fly and was the first to design a plane with aerilons.

2. Compare this to the Antev An-225, a modern very-,limited-production monster that could haul 1.3 million pounds of cargo, and the 747 (hauling up to 900,000 pounds) and the mammoth Airbus A380—all relatively the same size but with fabulous design and power.

3.Rumpler made very significant aeronautical contributions to the German effort in WWI, as well as designed the first aerodynamic auto—his military planes though during the war were  great triumph, partially because they were also Germany’s first mass-production-possible aircraft.  This didn’t help him much when Hitler came to power—being Jewish, Rumpler was arrested, and then released by Goering who at least could find a small part of himself to save this one Jew who served Germany so well.

4.  Source for the Rumpler image is the wonderful ModernMechanix site here.

 

Interesting comparison chart for big planes: [Source]

 

The Oldest Image of a Flying Pig? An Adynaton Antiquarian Illustration, 1687.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 905

How old is the  saying, or rejoinder, “…when pigs fly”?  I dunno, and frankly it doesn’t really matter. Except for right now, when I found this rather extraordinary image of a pig-in-the-sky from 1687.  It isn’t a flying pig, but I’m not sure what it is:  the origin of the image is from J.de  Dalence, Traite de l’Aiman (publihsed in Amsterdam in 1687), a book about the history of magnetism.  But nothing else matters, just the flying, atmos-floating pig, right there in the sky, perfect against a puffy cloud. 

I suspect—without any intention of doing any research on my suspicion—that this may very well be the earliest depigtion of a flying pig.  And it just so happens to have appeared in the same year of Newton’s great Principigia. 

And just for the record, I wonder how often anyone sees an image 300+ or more years old of any of the other great adynations? For example, “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God”  from the Book of Matthew, 19:24, just doesn’t seem to lend itself to empirical description, as it would pretty much lessen and defeat the purpose of the literary description.

The flying pig, though, may be a horse of a different color, so to speak.

Advanced Utopian Martian Communities, 1911

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 904

This futuro-Utopian homage to ET-civilizations and space travel was written just too early to have been sucked up by period-appropriate Hollywood script raptors.  Reading it is a little out of the question and left to the domain of sci-fi archaeologists; the book is stuffy and dry  and very stiff (brittle !) without being terribly interesting and doesn’t stop for the right word when four will do. (See below for an example of the writing.)   The ideas though lurking beneath the surface though are pretty good for its time, though they are hardly the great undertow that rips you away and out of the clutches of the stuff that make this a pretty object rather than a book. 

To Mars via the Moon, an Astronomical Story. written by Mark Wicks and published in 1911, left the Moon quite behind in its literary assault on a super-advanced civilization that the space travelers find on the red planet.  Wicks owes a big nod (and gives it) to the astronomer and faded theorist Percival Lowell and his Mars as an Abode of Life (1908)1.  Wicks’ Mars is enormously advanced techno-superpower filled with telepaths and mega intelligence, as well as a reincarnated version of his own dead son. 
Okay, enough.  I’m really just stopping here because of the noble outsider-like Martian city/landscape, a circular city with canal2-like connectors. It’s a busy environment, with the perspective-challenged city looking vaguely bathed in a holy halo, car-like objects skimming along the canal-roads, and “pre-flying saucers” in the air.  It is lovely in its own way—certainly the publishers thought so, as they incorporated the design right on the spine of the book.   

Notes

 

1.Lowell’s hypothesis was rounding criticized by many, including Alfred Russell Wallace’s  Is Mars Habitable?.

 

2. Giovanni Schiaparelli reported these features first, in 1877, referring to them as canali in his native Italian, which means something more like naturally-occurring grooves or channel; English-speakers like Lowell stopped just short with the word, lopping of the final “I” and going with “canals”,  with its overt implications of intelligent design.  And thus are religions born.

 

The entire book can be found on the Gutenberg site: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2763/27633-8.txt

The sample of the writer’s ware is below, the final two paragraphs of the book: the penultimate paragraph being one long run-on sentence including four embedded exclamation points, and the final two sentences of the final graph ending in an exclamation point and a dot dot dot question mark:
 
“Yes, we are doing well--there is no doubt about that; but,
notwithstanding my present very satisfactory circumstances and the certainty of a brilliant future if I stay here, ideas have long and persistently been running in my mind that it would be far better for me to go back to Mars, and--by Jove! strange indeed that I never thought of it before!--perhaps those very persistent ideas are actually the outcome of Martian influences!!”

“The wonderful music I heard upon Mars still rings in my ears; and, at times, so thrilling and peculiar is its effect upon me, that I feel as though I were being almost irresistibly impelled to return to that planet. Well, I should very much like to see the dear old Professor and Merna again, and also my many Martian friends. Then there's Siloni, whom I can never forget, for mentally her image is ever before me. What a nice girl she was! If I were to return to Mars, I wonder whether...?”

First edition spine source: http://www.sumnerandstillman.com/Catalog/sumner.cgi/9691

Ocean-Crossing Floating Airports Across the Atlantic, 1935

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 903

This short shelf-lived idea was that of Edward R. Armstrong (1880-1955), who in 1927  first published his plan for a series of 1200’x200’ floating platforms for refueling and whatnot for transcontinental flights.  These five-acre stations—named the “Langley” in honor of Samuel Pierpont Langley¹-- would be placed every 375 miles across the ocean.  It doesn’t look like a very practical (or good) idea, but Armstrong received a $750,000 piece of development change from du Pont and GM, which was major dollars in 1929. 

 

Armstrong’s idea would get major play in the popular press from time-to-time, his project renamed “The Seadrome” and discussed as a series of floating islands.  Armstrong himself would organize the Seadrome Ocean Dock Corp. in the late 1930’s, his pretty but enormously impractical idea (reported by Time Magazine² in 1933 as little more than “a perennial gift to Sunday feature editors”)  finally grinding to a salty end with greater fuel capacity and efficiency in transatlantic aircraft. 

An even worse idea appeared in the pages of Science and Mechanics in 1936:

 
Notes:

1. A Time Magazine article published 28 October 1929 [a day before the market crashed!] about the Langley oddly states that Langley was the “designer of the plane which, except for accidents, might have flown before the Wrights' plane did in 1903”.  Tough potatoes. What the magazine didn’t state was that Langley, who was the president of the Smithsonian Institution at the time with access to major money and benefactors simply went about the flight problem incorrectly, and produced an airplane (or “aerodrome”, as he called it) that did not and would not fly. Not flying because of accidents means, well, not flying.  The Wrights’ approach to problem solving was elegant and beat Langley by miles.  Langley deserves credit for his other (many) achievements, but not for this aircraft.

 

This same article only references Armstrong as a “swarthy engineer”.

The article is reprinted below.

 

Books: Texts in the Sciences: Darwin, Newton, Vesalius, Bacon, Copernicus, Galileo, etc.

Darwin

Charles Darwin (1809-1882): The Voyage of the Beagle, 1845

Charles Darwin (1809-1882): On the Origin of Species, 1859

Charles Darwin (1809-1882): The Descent of Man, 1871, excerpts

Charles Darwin (1809-1882): The Descent of Man, 1871

 

Theory and Methods of Science

Bernardino Telesio (1509–1588): from On the Nature of Things According to Proper Principles, 1565

Francis Bacon (1561-1626): from First Book of Aphorisms

Francis Bacon (1561-1626): Preface to the Novum Organum [At Hanover] Francis Bacon (1561-1626): The New Atlantis, 1627

Francis Bacon (1561-1626): The New Atlantis, 1626

Francis Bacon (1561-1626): Various Texts 

On Not Mentioning the Jews in Nazi/Polish/Holocaust Literature: "Spring Held No Hope", 1942

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 902

Maria Mikorska’s Spring Held No Hope, published in London in June 1941 is a difficult, hard, emotional read, even in the genre of Holocaust literature.  It quickly paints a documentary history of bestial behavior of the Nazis in Poland.  I wonder though what happened to the mentioning of the Jewish issue in all of this reportage of inhuman transportation and treatment of humans, as the reference almost never occurs.  

Reading though this 52-page pamphlet of terror and horror, I wondered what exactly happened to the missing reportage of the hunting and killing of the Jews as a group.. The period of 1939-1941 saw the beginning of the Endlösung der Judenfrage¹ (“The Final Solution of the Jewish Problem”) in which 90+% of the 3.5 million Polish Jews alive in the Polish Second Republic were killed and exterminated, the primary victims of the Nazi Holocaust.  At this point in the war the Nazis were removing Jews from their cities and establishing regional ghettoes.  Once the Jews were collected in this manner it was easier for the administration of their extermination.

Getting back to Spring Held No Hope and the lack of identification of the Jews as a persecuted group I turn to pp 24 and 25 (illustrated below and clickable).  

The examples of inhuman transport and the direct extermination of men, women and children by starvation and hypothermia mention the cities Jarocin, Gdynia, Siedlice, Skierniewice, Lublin and Otwock:  all of which had large centers of Jewish populations that were removed by the Germans directly after the invasion and removed to ghettoes though this fact is not mentioned in this pamphlet. Ostensibly the collection of Jews was not in an effort to seize property (as the majority of the Jews in Poland at this time had little wealth) but rather to supply labor (being a group with the potential for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of humans capable of performing slave labor).  The Jews in Gdynia (for example) were sent to Siedlice to establish a larger Ghetto immediately after the invasion; by 1942 the tens of thousands of occupants were either shot and killed or sent to Treblinka; 2,000 or so remained after this, though most of them were also soon sent to Treblinka; those remaining were all executed when the ghetto was completely liquidated on 14 April 1943. 

I am in no way saying that it the murder of Poles during the Nazi occupation was limited to Jews—the 3.5 million Polish Jews represented 10% of the Polish population; of the remaining 90%, or 32 million or so Gentile Poles, some 3 million were killed by the Nazis, or about 10% of that population.

These are horrible stories told by Mikorska—but I’m bothered by the lack of the recognition of the Jews as the major, featured target in all of this and wonder if the author suffered an enormous sin of omission. This is far from being  a singular event--even the important and highly significant Eisenhower report on the concentration camps of May 1945 does not signify the Jewish people as anything out of the ordinary--and may well be indicative of the general practice of dealing with the Jewish aspect of the Nazi exterminations.

Notes

1. The name and practiced of the Final Solution was infamously adopted at the Wannsee conference on 20 January 1942, liquidating the ghettoes and sending the occupants to the six major concentration camps of Auschwitz, Belzec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibór and Treblinka.

I've written elsewhere in this blog on the Holocaust; for more, search "Holocaust" in the Google blogsearch in the left column.

Unintentional Absurdist Art: Flying Boats with Bucket Feet, 1745

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 901

This treadmill-powered French pontoon dredge, printed around 1745, looks for all the world as though it is floating in mid-air, propelling itself along with two bucket-ended legs, elegantly and impossibly moving its miracle-y-balanced self forward against all forms of reason and logic, a clunky 18^th century non-transforming Transformer.  The profile actually and simply shows a dredge at work and just  fails to show the water in which it floats. 

The boat’s dredge is powered by four humans in two treadmills which would move the buckets back and forth, scraping up the river silt and then emptying it into the shuttle launch aft.  Simple and ingenious—except when taken out of context, where it begins to look like some advanced Age of Reason floating boat which, although awkward-looking, is not without its charm.  

Source:  Charles Singer, History of Tecnology, volume IV, pg. 634.  Singer loftily notes that this machine “is reminiscent of Goethe’s poem Der Zauberlehring which inspired Paul Dukas’s well known symphonic poem L’apparenti sorcier” and which would be better known to most folks as Mickey’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice gig in Fantasia.

History of the Future: Space Cannon Moon Flights Yield Jelly People?(1936)

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 899

The Babel-like tower pictured below is a still from the movie Things to Come (1936), an adaptation of H.G. Wells' The Shape of Tings to Come (1931).  (Wells' himself wrote the screenplay a few years before the movie appeared.)  The story is a history of the period from 1936 to 2054, including a devastating war that begins in December 1940 (complete with major air assault, poison gases and so on), followed by plague and destruction for another forty years, after which there is a confrontation between two classes of remaining humans, with big doses of New World Order, Technocracy, Fascism and glimmers of hope of science and technology saving the future.  There's a lot that happens in the story, but the part I'm most interested in comes towards the end of the film and depicts a space gun for launching a massive capsules to the Moon--in this case, a capsule containing two "starred-crossed lovers".

We are told that the launching apparatus--the "gun"--is 1500 feet tall, which iterates out to a 750'  base and which also makes the capsule about 75'.  That's impossibly massive firepower. (Don't forget that somebody had to construct the 1700' tower next to the gun that lifted the capsule into position, for some reason lowering the thing down the barrel.)

In the history of big guns, this would be about the most massive ever constructed in the sci fi world so far as I can tell. In the real world, the Kaiser Wilhelm gun (or "Paris Gun", the Kaiser Wilhelm Geshutz) was a long-barreled, light shelled monster: its 92' long barrel (plus a 20' extension) launched a 94kg shell about 130 km, reaching a maximum height of 40km (about 25 miles) high. For all of its mass (the gun weighed 256 tons without the railway cars) the shell that it fired didn't weight much at all....though the shell did reach an extreme height. (Ironically, the gun was built for attacking the deepest of the deep bunkers of the fortresses along the Maginot Line; it was never needed for that, as the Maginot Line was simply left behind in the Nazi assault on France.)

The Schwerer Gustav was a 1350 ton beast which fired a 14,000 pound shell (!) about 20 miles. A  little later came the Nazi V-3 (the lesser known of the V-weapons), the Vergeltungsewaffe 3, a 130 metre (!) long, 150mm gun built along the side of a hill, launching a 140 kg shell. The Iraqi Big Babylon gun was sort of like this one, though never built--it was to have a 500' barrel and would be supported by a hillside. 

Getting back to the unfortunate Well's space gun: this thing was supposed to fire a 75' capsule which must've weighed in excess of 10,000 pounds (easy, what with supply and fuels and so on, plus the structural weight) straight up (!!) and somehow reach escape velocity of 11.2 km/s, piercing the exosphere some 400 miles high or thereabouts (or 1.5 orders of magnitude higher than the Paris Gun).  I cannot intuitively imagine the tremendous explosion necessary to achieve this goal, although it could be figured out pretty easily.  Back of the napkin figuring tells me that the speed of the capsule exiting the gun's barrel would place the occupants in the vicinity of something like 450Gs--that's more than ten times the lethal amount of force that a human can withstand.  I'm not sure what happens to a person at 450Gs--I do know that it wouldn't be pretty.  Anyway, none of this part of the space travel section of the movie wasn't pretty....except for the props, which I like, and which can be seen in the clip below.

Overall I think that this would make a lovely physics problem for discussion in a high school classroom. 

Things to come: 10; 1936-2037