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

  • The Unexpected Unintentional Unusual: Maps of America

    JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2162   An offshoot of the Unintentional Absurdist series

    After all of this time on this blog–six years now and 3,000 posts–I think that I would have paid more attention to Unintentional and Unexpectedly Odd Maps of America that bobble up here and about in the home collection. The are odd and strange maps though none really relegated to America–there are strange maps of NYC (as in NYC being disappeared, or lifted by strange anti-gravity implements to float serenely above its hollowed ground below)–but none of the entire country.  And so a few have come up, unexpected and unusual things, though not so much in and of themselves, but separately.  What I mean to say is that the maps (for the large part) make sense with regards to their texts–not terribly much though without.  And so, here are the first few (and brief) examples:

    Maps of US GIMP

    This rather strange example was printed as the covers of a pamphlet in 1928 and comes from the American Foundation for the Blind, simply showing the progression of the agency’s representatives extending out beyond the originating point of New York City, though on  first sight the map is very unusual, and naively odd.

    This sort of map in the “Unexpected” category differs from the intentional oddness of maps like (the very recent) map of the U.S. showing distances to McDoanld’s, or I.W. Moore’s 1833 map incorporating an eagle into the design of the early RepublicMaps Eagle America

     or even the Porcineographic map of the U.S. of 1876:

    This porcineograph

    Again, they are very unusual images–particularly the latter–and they were trying to be so.  The Unexpected Unusual map is unusual but not by choice. 

     Another example is the cover illustration for A Brides Guide to the U.S.A., which was intended for the (British) brides of American servicemen returning to the U.S. following the end of WWII.  More than anything, the whole arrangement of the pamphlet is just a little off.Maps of US 2 odd043

    And lastly, for now, comes a puzzling map from an oddly-named pamphlet called Conservation (More or Less Humor) which was an appreciation of some of C.C.C. camps (Civilian Conservation Corps) and shows little sign of authorship (“S. Martin”) and none of place of publication.

    Maps of US 3 odd044

     The whole production is pretty happenstance, somewhat crude, and probably quickly undertaken and completed, giving it an air of slim and slippery mystery.  The end result for the pamphlet cover, though is unusual, and a little creepy, somehow, and in a way it is a great representative of the Unexpected/Unusual/Unintentional in maps.  

     

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  • The Non-Talking Talkie–Soundless Talking Pictures (1917) and the Beauty of Timelessly Bad Ideas

    JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2162

    “Motion-picture and method of producing the same.”

     

    I’ve written a note earlier on this blog about the history of word balloons–it is the stuff that we think of today as the little clouds filled with words over the heads of comic book characters and such, but which had a long history stretching back at least to the Renaissance when speech was illustrated in a similar way, but with lovely scrolls instead of blank clouds (as we see above).

            See for example:

    The following illustrations though come at a great expense to the imagination, and were a weak but fully patented  attempt to replace spoken-word captions in the pre-audio motion picture–that is silent films before the Talkies.  In general I guess the complaint with illustrating speech during a photoplay was that the text card was a breakaway from the moving-picture part of the experience, necessitating a clean break from action so that the audience could read about what was being pantomimed.

    Folks were well underway in processes to produce sound motion pictures, though up to this point–1917–the systems were separate recordings of sound and speech which would be played in conjunction/synchronously though not necessarily at exactly the right moments with the motion picture. Edison was hot on this trail but with blemished trials, combining his kinetoscope and phonograph in very early and novel attempts at producing a sound motion picture in the first decade or so in the development of moving pictures. The next 20 years in this development are fairly complex, but the matter is fairly well solved by at least three different technologies by 1923 with the production of successful continuous sound-on-film motion pictures, and then most famously and successfully debuting with The Jazz Singer in 1927.  

    And then there is this colossal bit of overdeveloped-underdeveloped thinking that would link the seamless word of not needing text card interruptions with non-spoken speech–and coming just this shy of not meaning anything at all. The work is that of Charles F(elton) Pidgin (1844-1923) who was a very successful author of genre/historical romance books (though he did have an interesting-sounding title in The Letter H, a Novel). He was also an engineer of some sort with some advanced patents in calculating machines and devices, which is the way I came to his name (via a letter I have written to him by the director of the U.S. Census rejecting his tabulating apparatus because it basically produced too much info for too much money, but that’s another story). 

    Pigdin’s idea–in short–was to have an inflating paper text bubble issue from the mouth of the actor during a scene–in that way the view could see what the other actors on the screen were “hearing”. 

    Pigdin motion picture

    [Source:  the lovely Google Patents, here.]

    I know this might sound as though I’m judging a technological effort from the vantage point of the idea’s deep future, but I believe that this idea was a truly bad one right from the moment of conception, a two-beer idea that should’ve stayed in the bar, no matter if it was 1917 or 1967 or 2017.  Sometimes bad ideas are just bad ideas, top to bottom–and some of them are timesless, like this one.  

    NOTES:

    And from Pidgin’s patent, explaining it all: 

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  • 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. 

    Archibaldo books[“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.

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  • The Beauty of Pi, Times Two (and More)

    JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post 

    Pi060

    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:

    Pi061

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  • John Donne Doth Tell What Scientist is in Hell

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    “As soone as the doore creekt, I spied a certaine Mathematitian, which till then had bene busied to finde, to deride, to detrude Ptolomey; and now with an erect countenance, and setled pace, came to the gates, and with hands and feet (scarce respecting Lucifer himselfe) beat the dores, and cried; “Are these shut against me, to whom all the Heavens were ever open, who was a Soule to the Earth, and gave it motion?”
        “By this I knew it was Copernicus. For though I had never heard ill of his life, and therefore might wonder to find him there; yet when I remembered, that the Papists have extended the name, & the punishment of Heresie, almost to every thing, and that as yet I used Gregories and Bedes spectacles, by which one saw Origen, who deserved so well of the Christian Church, burning in Hell, I doubted no longer, but assured my selfe that it was Copernicus which I saw.”  –John Donne, Ignatius his Conclave… (The full title: Ignatius his conclave : or, his inthronisation in a late election in hell: wherin many things are mingled by way of satyr. Concerning the disposition of Iesuites, the creation of a new hell, the establishing of a church in the moone. There is also added an apology for Iesuites. All dedicated to the two adversary angels, which are protectors of the Papall Consistory, and of the Colledge of Sorbon. By Iohn Donne, Doctor of Divinitie, and late Deane of Saint Pauls.)

    CopernicusThe poem is a wide attack on the Jesuits and Ignatius of Loyola,depicting them/him int eh deep lake of fire–Copernicus may also be found there in the Devil’s regions, though he wouldn’t stay for long, as he was released from his torment by Mr. Donne.  While there though Donne makes an interesting observation on the Devil itself, thinking that it might be from outer space, an alien from another place, “I thought thee of the race of the starre”:

    “To whome Lucifer sayd; “Who are you? For though even by this boldnesse you seeme worthy to enter, and have attempted a new faction even in Hell, yet you must first satisfie those which stand about you, and which expect the same fortune as you do.”

    “Except, O Lucifer,” answered Copernicus, “I thought thee of the race of the starre Lucifer, with which I am so well acquainted, I should not vouchsafe thee this discourse. I am he, which pitying thee who wert thrust into the Center of the world, raysed both thee, and thy prison, the Earth, up into the Heavens; so as by my meanes God doth not enjoy his revenge upon thee. The Sunne, which was an officious spy, and a betrayer of faults, and so thine enemy, I have appointed to go into the lowest part of the world. Shall these gates be open to such as have innovated in small matters? and shall they be shut against me, who have turned the whole frame of the world, and am thereby almost a new Creator?”

    Ignatius is also released from the confines of Hell, but–as it is stated right there in the title of the work–he is sent on to the Moon to establish himself, in a place where he would do less than than had he remained with the Devil. 

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  • On the Uncommon Black Sky in the Renaissance

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    A quick note here adding to a growing collection of “deep black” antiquarian images–this one, oddly enough, a simple black sky.  As it turns out, there are not that many old images of black skies, night skies…nor are there any great numbers showing dark room interiors, or inside of caves.  So when I come across an interesting old engraving/woodcut with a lot of black, it gains my attention.  And so with the following, which is the title page from the Spanish astronomer Bernardus de Granollachs, Lunarium: in quo reperiuntur Coniunctiones & Oppositiones Lunae…, which was a small pamphlet of 16 pages printed in Rome in 1516.  The booklet contained tables of conjunctions and oppositions of the Moon, as well as this gorgeous title page. 

    Lunarium811

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  • The Slavery-is-not-a-Sin, Anti-Catholic Diatribist, Samuel Morse

    JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2136 
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    In what could be a very long thread, this installment in the Just Because You’re Smart Doesn’t Make You Smart series takes place on the ethically/morally suspect creator of the single-wire electrical telegraph, Samuel F.B. Morse. 

    Samuel_Morse det

    Some of this could have been learned at a young age via his “militant” Congregationalist minister father, who created “a household temper…of the deepest animosity against other faiths”1.  And then again, perhaps not–but even weighing the spirit of the times in which he lived (1791-1872), Morse had a particularly long-lived, deep, and very public hatred of the Catholic Church and “Popery”, finding it a creeping abomination that was setting out to destroy the United States via the churches propagandist agents in the Jesuits and through mass immigration.

    Morse’s book on this subject, Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States (1835), became a much-reprinted guidebook for Catholic-haters and immigration conspiracy types, curling itself around the impending priest-ridden despotism of the Vatican and (whatever was left of) the Holy Alliance.

    “Surely American Protestants, freemen, have discernment enough to discover beneath them the cloven foot of this subtle foreign heresy. They will see that Popery is now, what it has ever been, a system of the darkest political intrigue and despotism, cloaking itself to avoid attack under the sacred name of religion. They will be deeply impressed with the truth, that Popery is a political as well as a religious system; that in this respect it differs totally from all other sects, from all other forms of religion in the country.”2

    Morse also found slavery to be an ordained right and a creation of God for right, wise, benevolent and disciplinary purposes,3  writing about it publicly in his pamphlet An Argument on the Ethical Position of Slavery in the Social System, and its relation to the Politics of the Day4 in the middle of the Civil War, 1863.

    “Slavery or the servile relation is proved to be one of the indispensable regulators of the social system, divinely ordained for the discipline of the human race in this world, and that it is in perfect harmony … with the great declared object of the Savior’s mission to earth.” (Morse, Ethical Position of Slavery, 1863, page 10.)

    “My creed on the subject of slavery is short. Slavery per se is not sin. It is a social condition ordained from the beginning of the world for the wisest purposes, benevolent and disciplinary, by Divine Wisdom. The mere holding of slaves, therefore, is a condition having per se nothing of moral character in it, any more than the being a parent, or employer, or ruler.” (Morse, Ethical…, page 13.)

    Morse slavery(Via Yale University Library; also the Yale Slavery treatment of Morse, here.)

    The Yale website also goes on to point out that Morse thought it sacrilegious to oppose slavery and support Abolition (citing Samuel F.B. Morse, Letters and Journals, ed. E. L. Morse, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1914, 2:416):

    “Conscience in this matter has moved some Christians quite as strongly to view Abolitionism as a sin of the deepest dye, as it has other Christian minds to view Slavery as a sin . . . Who is to decide in a conflict of consciences? If the Bible is to be the umpire, as I hold it to be, then it is the Abolitionist that is denounced as worthy of excommunication; it is the Abolitionist from whom we are commanded to withdraw ourselves, while not a syllable of reproof do I find in the sacred volume administered to those who maintain, in the spirit of the gospel, the relation of Masters and Slaves”

     This goes on and on, a distribe with Scriptural and distanced-moral support, on into a cold dark night of extraordinary egotism and ethical despotism.  And it is a fine example of people with some great abilities and high intelligence could be correct in some things and wrong in so many others. 

    Notes:

    1.Gustavus Myers, A History of Bigotry in the United States, Random House, 1943, p. 160.

    2. Wikipedia article on SFB Morse.

    3.. Edward Lind Morse, editor, Samuel Finley Breese Morse, His Letters and Journals, vol 2, pp 19, 46-8, 531.

    4. An Argument on the Ethical Position of Slavery in the Social System, and its relation to the Politics of the Day (New York, Papers from the Society for the Diffusion of Political Knowledge, no. 12, 1863)

    Samuel_Morse

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  • On Mathematics and the Imagination, J.J. Sylvester, 1869

    Photo of SylvesterJF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

    “When I imagine a triangle, even though such a figure may exist nowhere in the world except in my thought, indeed may never have existed, there is nonetheless a certain nature or form, or particular essence, of this figure that is immutable and eternal, which I did not invent, and which in no way depends on my mind.–Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) tr. John Cottingham, Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy (1986)

    This is the lovely response by the great mathematician J.J, Sylvester to Thomas Huxley’s muckety comment on the lack of imnagination in the mathematical sciences.  Huxley’s remarks were made at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, stating that (Mathematics) “is that study which knows nothing of observation, nothing of induction, nothing of experiment, nothing of causation”1 This quote is taken from Sylvester’s quick and elegant responses in two articles in Nature, December 30, 1869 (231-3) and January 6, 1870 (pp 261-3), as “A Plea for the Mathematician” and “A Plea for the Mathematician II”.

    SYlvester copy“For Sylvester, the ability to be able to imagine  what the experience of space would be like in dimensions other than three is sufficient to establish the empirical basis of geometry–the three-dimensional Euclidean is not the science of space in general, but the science of the space of our experience.”–Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the Nineteenth-Century Literary …by Jonathan Smith, pp 181-182

    Ex nihilo nihil fit/Nothing comes out of nothing.–R Descartes, Principia philosophiae, Part I, Article 49

    The original papers are available on this blog’s bookstore section.

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  • A Map of Nobody Marching Through the Southern Mountains, 1865

    JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2137  One of a series of posts on the History of Blank, Empty,and Missing Things 
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    Civil war--mil map sherman asheville188

    In the history of blank, empty, and missing things in maps there can be maps with large expanses of nothingness (as in the case seen here with the Bellman’s map from Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, an Agony in Eight Fits), maps with mostly everything that was to be expected to be expected but intentionally wrong (as with these propaganda maps of the Polish and Czech “threats” to Germany), maps with large expanses of nothing because there was simply so data to be displayed, and so on.  And then there are the cases of perfectly good maps that are accurate and secure, but do not display what was thought to be there on the map but wasn’t because it really wasn’t there. 

    In the store that I maintained in downtown Asheville, North Carolina, I was often asked about what sort of Civil War action occurred around those parts.  It is the sort of question that jumps out from maps showing troop movements during the war that you see on maps–maps without contour lines, or anything else that might show elevation. The answer to that question about Civil War battles here in the southern reaches of the Appalachians is that there was very little official action–and for the most part the reason for that is because there are in fact the Southern Highlands, and in the mid-19th century this very large region was just too bloody difficult to fight in or fight for. 

    This all becomes cartographically apparent when you look at the region with maps that give you an idea of the terrain. 

    There is an amazing map that shows you the extent to which this land was inhospitable for combat. The Military map of the marches of the United States forces under command of Maj. Gen. W.T. Sherman, U.S.A. during the years 1863, 1864, 18651…., which was originally published in 1865 but more widely known for its inclusion in the Atlas to Accompany the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies2 (full text here) in 1895.  As the map graphically shows, there are plenty of blu and gray lines depicting troop movements of the armies, though nearly all swarm around our mountainous region.

    http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5247/5281408282_bdec02e5a4.jpg

    Apart from the difficult terrain, the mountains, and general inaccessibilty, there wasn’t all that much to fight for up here–and so, aside from some regional skirmishes and a lot of political and social conflict, they didn’t.

    Civil war--mil map sherman asheville188

    At least not until the very end of the war, in the Battle of Asheville, April 6, 1865, where about 1500 soldiers met each other about 750 feet away from where we used to live, three days before Appomattox. The action there was indecisive, though Asheville was not taken by Union forces.

    And the detail:

    Civil war--mil map sherman asheville189

    Notes

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  • An Alphabet of Un- Words in “Ulysses”

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    James-joyce detailed

    James Joyce painted with words like perhaps no other–words created and words already created, thousands of them.  What struck me particularly though while looking through Miles Hanley’s Word Index to James Joyce Ulysses, winding my way somehow to the “U” section was the master’s rich un-use use of “un-” words, words prefixed with “un”.  It seems surprising to me that there were so many, but that was just a flash reaction, not compared to Shakespeare or Dickens or anyone else.

    There are about 400 entries for words beginning with “un”.  The following are some examples:

    Un Alphabet

    James-joyce detailed 2A Unaccountable, unadjustable, unaltered, unanswered, unanswering, unascertain, unassuminly, unattached, unattired

    B  Unbeheld, unbelief, unbelieve, unbiond, unblessed, unblioused, unborn, unbaced, unbridled, ubroken, unbuttoned, unbottoning

    C  Uncalledfor, unceasingly, uncertain, uncertainly, uncertainty, unclaimed, unclamping

    D   Un deathliness, underbrim, under jaw, undermines, understandlings, indespairings

    E   Uneager, unexplicated

    F  Unfallen, unfeigned, unledged, unfructified

    G  Unglanced, unguical, ungenitive, ungyved

    H  Unheaded, unhasty, unheeding

    I  Uninterruptedly, uninverted

    J  Unjust  (the only entry)

    K  Unkindly (and three pedestiran others)

    L  Unlace, unlet, unliving, unlookedfor, unlooped

    M  Unmack, unmaided, unmerciful

    N  Unneath, unnumbered

    O  Unobserved, unoffending, unostentationaly

    P  Unplumbed, unpar, unposted, unprepossessing

    Q  Unquestionably (and one other)

    R  Unreason, unremembered, unreeled

    S  Unsaluted, unskirted, unsleeved

    T  Untrammeled

    U  Unweave, unwooded, unwound.

    Unfortunately there are no entries for V, W, X, Y, or Z. 

    I do not have the un-words of Shakespeare, though it is interesting to see the list of words invented by him (from Shakespeare-online.com, here):

    academe accused addiction advertising amazement
    arouse assassination backing bandit bedroom
    beached besmirch birthplace blanket bloodstained
    barefaced blushing bet bump buzzer
    caked cater champion circumstantial cold-blooded
    compromise courtship countless critic dauntless
    dawn deafening discontent dishearten drugged
    dwindle epileptic equivocal elbow excitement
    exposure eyeball fashionable fixture flawed
    frugal generous gloomy gossip green-eyed
    gust hint hobnob hurried impede
    impartial invulnerable jaded label lackluster
    laughable lonely lower luggage lustrous
    madcap majestic marketable metamorphize mimic
    monumental moonbeam mountaineer negotiate noiseless
    obscene obsequiously ode olympian outbreak
    panders pedant premeditated puking radiance
    rant remorseless savagery scuffle secure
    skim milk submerge summit swagger torture
    tranquil undress unreal varied vaulting
    worthless zany gnarled grovel

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  • Yes, We Have No Bananas

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    This unusual promotional featured the perentially unsmiling and striking face of TAD (Thomas A. Drogan, 1877-1928), a cartoonist and sports writer and major contributor to the American slang vernacular. 

    TAD[Source: advertisement in Moving Picture World, January 1919]

    His contriubtions included such words/expressions as “appelsauce” (as an expression of hearing nonesense), “cake-eater”, “cat’s meow/pajamas (expressing high praise), “cheaters” (for eyeglasses), “dogs” (for feet),”dumbbell” (an unkind and slippy word for a not-smart person),  “dumb Dora”, “drugstore cowboy” (for a do-nothing/loafer), “finale hopper”, “hard boiled” (for a street- and ordinary-tough, or detective), “nickel nurse” (a great nickname for a miser/cheap person), “skimmer” (for a hat), and of course the immortal phrases “Yes, we have no bananas” and “You tell ’em!”

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