JF Ptak Science Books – A Daily History of Holes, Dots, Lines, Science, History, Math, Physics, Art, the Unintentional Absurd, Architecture, Maps, Data Visualization, Blank and Missing Things, and so on. |1.6 million words, 7500 images, 4.9 million hits| Press & appearances in The Times, Le Figaro, Mensa, The Economist, The Guardian, Discovery News, Slate, Le Monde, Sci American Blogs, Le Pont, and many other places… 5000+ total posts since 2008.

JF Ptak Science Books

A Daily History of Holes, Dots, Lines, Science, History, Math, Physics, Art, the Unintentional Absurd, Architecture, Maps, Data Visualization, Blank and Missing Things, and so on. |1.6 million words, 7500 images, 4.9 million hits| Press & appearances in The Times, Le Figaro, Mensa, The Economist, The Guardian, Discovery News, Slate, Le Monde, Sci American Blogs, Le Pont, and many other places… 5000+ total posts since 2008.

Contact johnfptak at gmail dot com

Infographic of the RMS “Queen Mary” When it was the Cunnard “534” (1932)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

The fine infographic below displays the size and might of the Cunnard line’s newest ship, “534”, which would be christened the RMS Queen Mary two years from when this image was published (in Popular Mechanics, January 1932). It was a beast, a thousand feet long with a crew of a thousand, it shuttled 2,100 passengers across the Atlantic for 33 years, and for a number of those years held the record for the quickest crossing. I particularly like it standing next to the newly-completed Empire State building.

(Note: this image becomes clearer when enlarged)

The launching of the Queen Mary

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Information, Quantitative Display of
Supermegalopolis of the Year 4307

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2606

A wonderful series of images appeared in the work of Darran Anderson on his Imaginary Cities (https://twitter.com/Oniropolis) contribution on Twitter. He shared several images by the great Winsor McCay illustrating humorous/satirical/speculative sci-fi/fantasy pieces by John Kendrick Bangs (1862-1922) on what the future might be, publishing them in the New York Herald in addition (at least) the Los Angeles Herald in 1906. One of the stories that I found most intriguing was on a supermegalopolis called Philyorgo–the vision of it being made possible via the invention of a fantastical instrument called the Spectrophone. It enabled the viewer to see (and hear!) into the future. In this installment the narrator tells his audience about an enormous city of the year 4307 called Polyorgo. It is basically a city comprising the cities of Washington DC, Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia, and all the little cities in-between, all rising in a neat 30-strata rectangle 1,600 feet tall and 238 miles long (which doesn’t quite get to Chicago, but no matter. It is the imagery that matters, not the math [you can’t spell “matter” without M A T, but…]).

From the Los Angeles Herald: “At this point,” cried the megaphone bred pilot, “we see the southern exposure of the city of Philyorgo, the commercial capital of the universe. It is 238 miles in length, extending from what was once the city of New York on the north to the ancient city of Washington on the south, and from base to sky line runs sixteen thousand feet above the level of the sea.

“As you are aware, It is the greatest commercial aggregation in the universe, having a greater population than Mars, Saturn, the Great Dipper and Europe combined, and is the result of the annexation by the city of Chicago of New York, Philadelphia. Washington and other smaller cities lying between. It consists of thirty different strata, including basement and roof. Its resemblance to the skyscraper of other times being due to the superimposition of city upon city, until the final plateau-like sky line was reached, upon which dwell the workers who during working hours go below into the various underlying sections to which their business calls them.”

“The various floors are connected from basement to roof by fast flying elevators, which daily carry the public to and from business at lightning speed. In the basement are the furnaces and dynamos by which the whole city is heated and by which the motive power for the rapid transit facilities of Philyorgo is supplied. The first floor above the basement contains all tho longitudinal rapid transit walks, moving without cessation around the city day and night at rates of speed varying from four to five hundred miles an hour. These lines of movable walks are arranged in concentric parabolic circles, so that a traveler wishing to proceed at the greatest rate of speed by stepping briskly from the fixed and Immovable walk on the outside across the Intervening circle toward the rapidly moving innermost platform may with perfect safety board the section that is traveling with the greatest velocity. By this means a wayfarer in Phllyorgo may go from one end of the city to the other in a trifle over two hours, finding at intervals of the ordinary city block the express elevators that will take him upward to the stratum he desires to reach.”

The complete Bangs story is here: California Digital Newspapers Collection The Los Angeles Herald Volume 33, Number 155, 4 March 1906 http://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=LAH19060304.2.140.29

Sources:

Imaginary Cities (https://twitter.com/Oniropolis)

A good source for this McCay material is the Norman Rockwell Center: http://www.rockwell-center.org/essays-illustration/the-rising-tide/

The quotation source for the Bangs article: California Digital Newspapers Collection The Los Angeles Herald Volume 33, Number 155, 4 March 1906 http://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=LAH19060304.2.140.29

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Future Punk — Future, History of the — History of the Future
Communism and the Path of Death (1942)

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The design of the cover of this pamphlet attracted my attention straight-away–the back story to it makes this something else, entirely. It turns out that Le Chemin de la Mort was the death train of Communism, and their author, A(ndre) Chaumet, turns out to be a vicious racist and anti-Semite, and was a member/leader of a acronymic-potpourri of French nationalist/fascist groups. What is particularly eyebrow-raising is that among other things Chaumet was vice-president of the Association of Anti-Jewish Journalists (!); he was also the leader of the National Socialist People’s Party which joined in 1936 with Francisme fascist league, and was a Petainist and collaborator, and accepted money from the Nazis to better his work in France; he was the editor of Petit catechisme anti-Juif and on and on, a very busy man. I can’t find out what happened to Chaumet after the war, but I imagine whatever it was, it wasn’t so great. So the “interesting” part of the design of the pamphlet falls away for me in the layers of discovery about the author, whose well of darkness seems to have no bottom.

One thing is for sure, though–Germany created an insatiably-wide path of death when it invaded the U.S.S.R. in June 1941 (Unternehmen Barbarossa)–and then that turned around, and the death path of Communism worked its way to Berlin, though Chaumet at this time had no idea about any of that.

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Uncategorized
The King and the Swastika (1941)

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2607

This is certainly an early telling of this story, now so often repeated–it occurs in the address “Danmark”, given by Joe Congress on the radio station WBYN (1430), Brooklyn, on September 30, 1941, at 10:15 p.m. The address came about a year and a half after the occupation of Denmark by Germany (April 9, 1940)–there was an mortifying existence between the Nazis and the Danes from that point out to the end of the war. It is in this broadcast where Congress tells the story of the King of Denmark and the Nazi flag.

The king, Christian X (1870-1947), observed a Nazi flag flying from a public building in Copenhagen, which was “a rank violation of the terms which Adolf Hitler imposed on Denmark”. The King, riding on a horse, reigned it in, and addressed a German officer standing by the building with the flag:

“Take it down !” the King ordered a German officer in front of the building.

“Orders from Berlin,” replied the officer.

“The flag must be removed before 12 o’clock; otherwise I will send a soldier to do it,” the monarch declared.

“The soldier will be shot,” warned the Nazi officer.

“I am the soldier!” said the King.

The Swastika came down.

It is a terrific story, and Congress heaps the praise on the king and on the Danes in general–but, on the other hand, he laments that there’s little of this behavior going on presently in Denmark, and talks about the neutering of the police and branches of government. He does however talk about the growth of patriotic songs and poetry, which has become a new resistance weapon for the Danes.

Congress asks, “do not the Danes sing today, as they did years ago:

Fill up holes of ignorance, and bury

narrow selfishness beneath the sod.

Of the meek and soft evoke a people

That will bend its will alone to God.”

Evidently they did, because Congress reports that in the growing community sings of Copenhagen that hundreds of thousands of people were turning out to sing in the squares and parks–10,000 stood in Faelldepark. It is a patriotic weapon “that the Nazis cannot match”.

I looked up Mr. Congress and found this review of his broadcast, in Radio-News, for Auguast 9, 1941. It is remarkable in the small-world category because in this shrt review there is mentioned an interview with Alexander Uhl, foreign editor for PM newspaper, and someone who works and papers are here in my store.

Source: Radio Station WBYN, Brooklyn, NY (1430 Kilocycles). “Danmark”, by Joe Congress, September 30, 1941. Transcript printed by Free Denmark, Inc., 80 Broad Street, NYC. My copy was received by the Library of Congress less than a month later.

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Militaria — Social History
The Floating Cemetery of Piet Mondrian

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[Source: illustration from Piet Mondrian, Life and Work, edited by Cees W. de Jong, Abrams, 2015.]

I just wanted to open up this idea–I mean, I’m not an art historian, and the title doesn’t intend to insert this speculation in Mondrian’s mind as he painted this, but his Composition in Line (1916, oil on canvas, 42×42″) does to me look like a military graveyard. After he got stuck in the Netherlands following the beginning of WWI he entered into a very creative and morphing phase of his creative artistic life. His very recognizable primary color geometries of art start to appear in his notebooks in 1909, and geometric forms begin to appear in the skies and backgrounds of his representational landscapes and portraits (outside his Cubist mode) beginning at least in 1908, so to say that the war influenced very much in his creative spirit directly is probably wrong–but it doesn’t stop me from seeing The End of the Battle in these works.

Keeping to this theme, his Composition 10 in Black and White (1915, oil on canvas, 32×42″) looks a little like a trench map:

[Source: illustration from Piet Mondrian, Life and Work, edited by Cees W. de Jong, Abrams, 2015.]

Again, there’s no evidence to support these work as having anything to do with the war–they just suggest themselves to me, especially given the date.

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History of Goodbye — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at
A Sinister-Looking-Yet-Positively-Intended Pamphlet Cover

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This design has all the trappings of a modern right-wingish hatchet job screed publication denouncing and de-deifying the CIO (the other part of the AFL-CIO). As it turns out this gritty, demanding, and offsetting design is the cover for a pro-CIO publication, published by the organization itself. The shattered sky raining coal tar and blood is falling on what sorta looks like a collection of imitation Soviet-y working folks. To me the art indicts the CIO for something, and that “something” is not good. But inside it is all wine and roses and fighting the good fight for teh working class. It is just a very odd job, badly done.

And the back cover:

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Anticipation, History of — Social History
The Canadian “College of Arms and Legs” for the Maimed Soldier (1917)

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I’m reprinting this rare broadside in the interest of the medical history of WWI. It seems not to be anywhere (I can only find one copy in WorldCat, at the Countway Library at Harvard University) and I’m not finding any references to it, offhand. It is interesting and appealing, a no-nonsense approach to provoking necessary attention to creating and securing artificial limbs for wounded Canadian solders.

Canada of course joined the war effort against Germany on the same day as Great Britain, about two and a half years before the U.S. declared war. In all more than 61,000 Canadian soldiers were killed during the war, as well as 172,000 wounded–the U.S. in contrast lost 126,000 killed and 204,000 wounded. Similar numbers, in a way, except that the U.S. had more than ten times the population, 92 million versus 7.2 mullion in Canada. The 172k wounded coming home in Canada would’ve been like 2.3 million returning to the U.S. (a number larger than the 2.09 million returning wounded in all of the British Empire). All that said: 230,000 killed and wounded in a population of 7/2 million is considerable.

This broadside discusses the Military Hospital Commission and the Orthopedic Hospital, and how its address (Yonge Street) could be renamed “Crutched Soldiers”, and that “was a title of honor, not reproach” and a “spur to bravery”. There is a discussion of Canadian legs versus English legs, leg weights, and such. Of high interest for me, though was the discussion of “two kinds of motorist”–one who always stops and gives a ride to a wounded soldier in the vicinity of the hospital, and the other, who doesn’t. The writer of the broadside clearly has no use for the later.

The report, in full (it is more legible expanded):

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Militaria — World War I
On Taking Someone to Task for Not Acknowledging Having Used Someone Else’s Work (1875)

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The brilliant and versatile W. Stanley Jevons–logician, economist, computer pioneer–was a very busy man who packed a lot into his 46 years. Some of published output included numerous journal articles, and some of those contributions included book reviews, including this one, on Theo. Ribot’s Heredity, a Psychological Study of it Phenomena, Laws, Causes, and Consequences, which was published in 1875, with the review appearing in the April 29, 1875 issue of Nature. This one popped into view not so much for its broad consideration, but for the zinger at the end, prodding Ribot for not having included an acknowledgment to Sir Francis Galton, whose work he quotes from and relies upon in his book–it is a fairly soft rebuke but not without its spikes:

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History of Memory
The Square in Tintin, Mondrian, & Malevich (1916-1930)

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2584

There are no doubt squares in the general outline of the comic book panels of Tintin–what I had in mind was a very special square that occurs in Tintin’s adventures in the Soviet Union. This was the first adventure of Tintin, and appeared in a serialized form in 1929-1930. We are introduced to the young and intrepid journalist/adventurer here in glorious black and white (this would be the only one of the Tintin adventures that was never rendered in color at one time or another), being sent off to the newish (since 1922) Soviet Union. At the time it was Stalin’s USSR, and things were not–shall we say–going well for the people of the Soviet Union. Tintin’s creator, Georges Remi (“Herge”) was working an anti-Marxist angle for his conservative publisher, and he had no difficulty in supplying story lines to fulfill that need–some of these were exaggerated overall, and some were exaggerated but proved correct over time. The adventures there were difficult, occasionally brutal, and overall not brutal enough.

Herge depicted an unpleasant Soviet Union, working out from the “stinking slum” of Moscow out to the farms that were being destroyed in the countryside. He insinuated threats of violence in voting, death by firing squads, the starving of the peasants, and much else. The deal is that by the time the strip reached its conclusion in 1930 Stalin was already underway in his loudly quiet way in instituting the Great Famine/Holodomor in the Ukraine, and by the end of this created famine–a reverse nuclear weapon of food withdrawal–something on the order of 7 million people would be starved to death by 1934. Then of course came the Great Terror of 1936-8, and the rest of it. Herge may have exaggerated some stuff in 1929/30, but few people could have imagined (even when it was happening) the scale of Stalin’s great evil.

That said, I wanted really to just talk about one square in the Tintin adventure. This is where Herge goes black (Soprano’s style)–he leaves an entire panel black to depict violence. Entirely black. I’m not a comic book/graphic novel guy, but I’ve seen my fair share of them (most <1970) and I have to say that seeing the black panel was extremely surprising. In my experience, it just didn’t happen.

And what that did was call to mind other squares–notably of course Kasimir Malevich’s (1878-1935) great construction, the Black Square (beginning in 1915):

Then of course there’s the Cubists…but what comes next to mind re the square (and the black one at that) are the later works by Piet Mondrian. Mondrian had gone through a tremendous period of change int he decades from 1905-1935, though it seems to me that even as early as 1909 squares began to appear in the skies (and other places) in his pre-Cubist representational paintings ( as in Sea Toward Sunset, 1909, and Church in Zeeland, 1909/1910), the geometry taking hold for good by 1916. A good example is Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Grey and Blue, 1921:

[Image source: http://www.abstractcritical.com/article/malevich-and-mondrian/index.html This illustrates an interesting article, “Malevich and Mondrian” by David Evison.]

And so we could wind our way through the history of black squares, but we’ll stop there. Oh, one more: the great squares of Oliver Byrne who in his gorgeous 1847 work replaced numbers with colors in presenting the first six books of Euclid:

[Source: https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/05/jf-ptak-scien-1.html I wrote a little about this in the first few months of this blog back in 2008 in “Dismantling Reality–Euclid, Mondrian, Malevich, Lobachevsky and the Appearance and Disappearance of Form Through Geometry”, which I admit is a big title for a thousand-word blog, but so it goes.]

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Paper Dissection of the Brain, 1844–Now with a GIF

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post (Revisiting an earlier post with an added GIF)

These images are brought to us by the Irish-born Quain brothers: Jones Quain (1796-1865), an anatomist and professor of Anatomy and Physiology at the University of London; and Richard Quain (1800-1887), professor of anatomy in 1832 at the University of London, then surgeon at North London Hospital, and president of the Royal College of Surgeons. The illustrations are from a later (ca. 1850’s) and smaller printing of their beautiful 1844 work The Anatomy of the Arteries of the Human Body, with its Applications to Pathology and Operative Surgery, in Lithographic Drawings with Practical Commentaries.

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Medicine, History of
The Sum of All Dreams–(The Caloric Capacity of Every Dream That Has Ever Been Dreamt)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post An entry in the series A History of Blank, Empty, and Missing Things

[From Rex Knight’s odd aether-waves work, Wake Up and Sleep!, 1938]

The good estimate of the number of people who have lived on the Earth is about 100 billion.

I wonder about the resting results in their lives, of their sleeping adventures, of their dreams.

If the average age of all people who have ever lived is, say, 30 years, that makes 3 trillion years of living, or about 1 quadrillion hours.

Let’s say that everybody got six hours of sleep for about 165 trillion hours; and let’s say that people dream, say, five times per not, that makes, again, about a quadrillion dreams.

If we in general burn 50 calories a dream, that translates to about 50 quadrillion calories holding up the dreams of mankind.

I wonder where all those dreams have gone?

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of