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.

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.

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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.]

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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 11×8 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)

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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.

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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.

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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,
39×35 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:

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“The First Thing is to Find Some Men” How to Get a Boy-Date, 1941

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 914

[Continuing the posts “What Makes Human Robot Girls, 1941” and The Missing Pieces of Women, Pope Joan and the Proper Girl]

Do Boys Like You? is
the name-of-the-game for girls, evidently (“set out to make yourself worthy of a boy’s
affection. Just one boy—any boy…”),
brought to you as a part of a long, continuing series by Elizabeth Woodward in
the Ladies’ Home Journal in the early
1940’s.

This installment is about getting a boy for a date, and how to make
oneself getable and datable and boy-friendly, all while maintaining the
thinnest veneer of self-acknowledgment (“be adaptable as a chameleon”) as possible while staying true to “yourself”. It is a cocktail of overall old-lady sense
and deep ruffled bows writ by the hand of gender entrapment and not-so-subtle
subjugation. Let’s get to it with some of the more archaeologically-interesting
statements of this social-norms-establishing pamphlet:

Paragraph: (Intro):

“Do boys like you, or don’t they? Its as easy as that! Either you have dates and go places with lots
of boys, or they don’t pay any attention to you at all.”

Paragraph: “A Female World”

“…the first thing is to find some men.” (Which is odd
because “men” is used only one other time beyond this reference—its all boys
and nothing but boys.)

“Short of throwing yourself on their (boys’) mercy, see if
you can’t wrangle an introduction out of the girls who do know boys…”

“Your parents could invite their friends over for dinner and
ask them to bring along their son. And you do a good job on him!” (I’m not sure
what that “job” is.)

“They (boys) can’t find you if you’re packed away in a mob
of females.”

Paragraph: “A Rank Outsider” (on being the new girl in a
community):

“The girls have things under control and they don’t want any
interference from you.”

“You might know more than they do, and you just might talk
down your pug nose at them.”

“…you’d better get accustomed to traveling alone…”

“Give them every chance to find out that you aren’t high
hat, that you like the same things they do, that you aren’t out to sniggle
their men away…”

“When they (the girls) accept you, the boys will too…”

Paragraph: “an Old Story”

“(Boys) are so used to looking at you that they think of you
as furniture.You’ve got to be new!”

“If you’re fat and pudgy, make yourself lean, sleek and
smart.”

Paragraph “Take it Easy”

“…its going to take practice to make boys like you. Take it
easy. Set out to make yourself worthy of a boy’s affection. Just one boy—any boy…”

Paragraph “A Few Gentle Hints” (Seems that we’ve gone way beyond this by now.)

“Don’t run around with girls who are dud.”

“Don’t go in pairs with a girl who is overwhelmingly popular…Better
pick a girl who will give you an even break.”

“Don’t languish for some local ‘hero’ who is sought after by
all the girls in town. He may be
good-but he’s far out of reach…”

“Don’t pick on a lad who has never had a date with a girl.”

“Don’t be careless or sloppy when you’re talking with boys…”

“Don’t expect (or even hope) that every boy you meet will
ask you for a date.”

And (not quite) lastly, but should’ve been:

“Don’t go around thinking about boys constantly.”

But lastly thus:

“Act as though you are having fun. Be alive, gay and enthusiastic. Be interested in what’s going on. Be sweet, tactful, and adaptable as a chameleon. Have definite likes and dislikes, but don’t be so rigid
that you are stubborn, opinionated and difficult to get long with. Be carefree,
casual, easy, willing to play and fun to play with. And don’t be shy about
liking the boys.

THEN THE BOYS WILL LIKE YOU! [Emphasis in the original.]

My poor mother would’ve been reading this…

(Thanks to Jeff Donlan for pointing out that the chap on the
cover carrying the girl away has joined the fabric of her skirt to (1) hold
onto and steady her and (2) make sure her skirt doesn’t fly up and out and is not actually touching her thigh…)

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When Civilians Aren’t Civilians: Blowing Up Bomb-Proof Cities, 1927-1934.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 915

We’re a few days past the 95^th anniversary of the
first aerial bombing of a city, the first in the long and unhappy calculus of
eliminating things and people in civilized settings by dropping high explosives (and etc.) on them
from the air. 19 January 1915 saw the first bombs dropped from an airship
during WWI, two German Zeppelins lighting up Great Yarmouth, Sheringham and
King’s Lynn in the U.K.—the
physical and strategic outcomes were minimal; the psychological and
intellectual aspects were not.

The effectiveness and temerity of bombing escalated
exponentially–virally by the end of WWII. Aerial bombing’s future
effectiveness and devastating potential was recognized by the early 1920’s, particularly
in the form of the Hague Conference
(1924), where the bombing of cities and civilians was theoretically controlled,
if not outlawed.

Of course the definitions of “bombing” and “cities” and “civilians”
and “non-combatants” were very loosely writ and were completely open to
(completely) wide interpretation in practice, and were especially liable to
racist necessities. I should also add that the concepts of “defended” and “undefended”
cities were—somehow—nebulous.

An encyclopedia could no doubt be written on nothing but the
these awful bits of bombing. And for another example of this I turn to
the French, who can supply more than their share, per capita, pound-for-pound,
to this equation. No, not the French return to Indochina in 1945 (after having
done business with the occupying Japanese forces for the entire war) and their
resurgent colonialism as practiced against the Vietnamese, or the heinous
practices against the Algerians just prior to that country’s
independence: it is their bombing practices in Damascus. Not the Syrian bombings of 1945
(which also included many other places like Aleppo,
Hama and etc.) but the French civilian bombings
of Damascus in
1925. For it was in that year that the League of Nations found that the
French really weren’t bombing and killing civilians indiscriminately when they
were doing so; they were, ironically, bombing themselves, and so their actions
were not illegal. (It was problematic, identifying “civilians”, as the
League didn’t necessarily grant the same sort of “humanness” to all human,
finding categories for barbarians and savages. It was acceptable to bomb
those later two categories, but not the first.) So the French sought to subdue
a rebellion against their oppressive rule in that country, identifying the
Muslim population centers in Damascus
as probable hotbeds of activities for the “bandits” that were causing them
their problems. October 18, 1925 is when this particular outrage
occurred; the Syrians protested, and the League considered.

And that was
about the size of the story for the Syrians, because as it turns out, the
French were just maintaining an order that for them was a simple police action;
civilians populations could not be bombed in the eyes of international law, if
the bombing was being done to a foreign people; since the French were there and
occupying the country, they were conducting a police action, and in a sense
were merely bombing themselves, loosening them from the barriers of whatever
international law could be applied to their actions by the League of Nations.

These are just a few examples from the French; there are
plenty more for other countries for every decade, every year. (The Brits in Teheran in 1924, the Italians
at Harar in 1935, Franco/Luftwaffe in Guernica
in 1937, the Japanese against Shanghai/Beijing/Tianjin (etc.) in 1937, and on
and on.)

The Big Fear of bombing from the air and the need to protect
the populations of cities led to all sorts of anti-bomb/bomb-proof
architectural plans, most not very good and not very practical. Such is the price of trying to make your
people happy. I happen to have

a few in
my files, which are seen above and below. (The top images were printed in the Illustrated London News in 134; the bottom in 1927.) The results of the plans were no doubt intended to pursue a common belief that cities could be constructed to be bomb-proof, that the future that national leaders were dragging their subjects into wasn’t necessarily as dire as the possibilities of aerial bombings hinted things might be. Of course the resulting buildings would be massive and impossibly expensive; the prospect for underground cities (and roads!) was just a non-starter. And these future-views would all be obsolete in less than 15 years what with the development of enormous firepower. And I’m not talking atomic.

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Bad Ideas — Future, History of the — History of the Future — Militaria — Technology, History of
What 1.5 Billion Pounds Bought the Military in 1938: Finding a Gem Inside a Great Graphic

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 916

The Illustrated London News for 27 February 1937 hosted a brilliantly designed graphic illustrating the ways in which the British War department could/should spend 1.5 billion pounds (or about $100 billion in 2009 dollars, sort of) over a five-year period as the price of keeping the peace. Of course they wouldn’t make it but a quarter of that distance as Austria fell to Czechoslovakia which fell to Poland and the end. The full-page pictorial effort is to the right:

Nestled in the corner of this page–at about 2×1 inches–is this lovely little graphic, showing that 1.5 bil could purchase 300 Queen Marys, which this delightful little design showed to great effect, and a hidden gem inside of a gem. First is a detail of this detail,

Followed by the full smidgen of the overall page of comparisons and analogies:

Then there’s the semi-standard presentation of what the Navy could purchase:

And then the Army:

And of course the Territorial Army:

And the Air Force (which if you look closely includes a balloon barrage facility at upper right):

By far the most interesting to me is the hidden gemoid of Queen Marys, all produced by the fabulous G.H. Davies, who did many hundreds of such images and sectional cutaways and plans and technical drawings for the ILN over a 25-year period. M.r Davies may well be my favorite technical artist of this period.

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Information, Quantitative Display of — Militaria — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at — Technology, History of
Missing Things Making Holes: Soviet Bread-not-Bombs in Finland, 1940

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 917

[This post is a hybrid category bridging “Blank and Empty
Things” and “A History of Holes”—it is really an entry for blank and missing
things making holes]

1. The Soviet Union’s foreign minister Molotov¹ wanted to make it very clear
to the rest of the world that his country was not bombing civilian targets in Finland during
the winter war of 1939/1940.

2. Molotov insisted that targets that were being bombed near
Finnish cities were actually airbases.

2.1   Also, since the
complaining FDR was over 4000 miles away there was no way that he could “see”
what was being bombed.

3. If there were civilian targets that looked as though they
were being bombed, then

    3.1   they weren’t being bombed; and

    3.2 if anything at all was going on the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics was dropping
bread on the town’s/city’s starving inhabitants.

4.   So far as
undefended, non-military targets were concerned, the Soviet
Union redefined “bomb” as “bread”.

5.   Therefore, what
we’re seeing in this image above are not bombs, but bread; that, or the houses
were airbases, which would turn the bread back into bombs.

Molotov insisted that no civilians were direct targets of
Soviet bombing campaigns in Finland. Also, if there were people being killed in
these bombing raids they would necessarily and by definition be aircraft
workers or air bases support staff or other military personnel.

This strikingly designed image is from the 17 February 1940
issue of The Illustrated London News;
the design is by G.H. Davies, the phenomenal ILN draftsman, and elegantly (and forcefully) depicts the innards
of the bomb and its effect on its target.

It is a spectacular and brilliant presentation of the
new(ish) Soviet hybrid terror bomb that was being used in the non-existent
attacks on Finnish cities. [The 5’ bomb
was made to be deployed in two sections:
the front end of the bomb inside the false nose cone contains dozens of
incendiary bombs, released by a revolutions-generated cap propeller, which fall
away from the main section of the bomb, which contains a high explosive.]

Since the non-existent bombs that were not being used against
non-military installations and were actually bread, the Finns gave the weapons
the nickname of “Molotov’s Breadbaskets”.

This was just a down-right nasty bomb, and the illustration
shows it falling on and destroying a quiet town with no visible military
advantage. The town not being bombed was called Sortavala, which—after numerous Soviet
attacks in December 1939—was in actuality destroyed by Soviet air power on 2
February 1940.

The man ultimately responsible for this campaign and the
murder of millions of his own countrymen through means of induced starvation,
disappearances and ruthless killings—Joseph Stalin—was post mortem dispatched
in much the same manner as the reasoning listed above. Stalin was ignored to the point of
non-existence, de-Stalinized and left
entirely out of the 50-volume second edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia² published just a few years after his 1953
death. Stalin executed his brutal and long-time political compatriot Lavrentii Beria, (1899 – 1953)
right before his own death, ordering that people who owned the GSE to physically cut out the
Beria entry. It is unfortunate that Stalin could not have been denied his
existence 30 years earlier.

Molotov, on the other hand, in spite of his enormous sins
against humanity (as principle architect of the Great Terror, the extermination
of millions of Ukranians, and etc.) was finally removed from government
following Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaigns (i.e. by 1962) and managed to live out the rest of his life
alive, not dying until 1986 at the age of 96.

(The “Molotov Cocktail” by the way was not named for him by
Soviet soldiers or freedom fighters or whatever fighting for the USSR—it was
named for the petrol bomb used by Finnish soldiers and civilians fighting
against the Soviets invading their country in 1939/11940 and again in 1943/4)

Notes

1. In 1940 Molotov was the foreign minister of the Soviet Union, and had just completed negotiating the
Non-Aggression pact with Nazi Germany.
This gave the USSR free range for its relations (read “occupy/annex”)
Estonia, Bessarabia, Latvia and the Ukranian/Belorussian-occupied section of
Poland (to the Curzon Line), and to also conduct its war with Finland. The fierce Finns never lost their
independence, though they did lose a part of their country.

2. The GSE had a somewhat complicated publishing history,
winding up with 65 volumes over its two editions, constructed with very
questionable state-controlled X-Ray communist vision spectacles. There is so much in these volumes that is wrong/sanitized/fiction that I have no idea how a non-specialist might be able to use the thing.

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Aviation & flight — Bad Ideas — Blank and Empty Things; A History of — History of Holes — Militaria
Missing “Dots” and Not Seeing the Discovery of Platelets, 1842

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 918

{This post continues some new and unusual cross-categories in this blog, like Missing Things Making Holes; Bombs as Breads. Today’s bit combines the “Blank, Empty and Missing Things” with “The History of Dots” categories.]

Alfred
Donne (1801-1878), physician, experimenter, microscopist and
photographer, is best known for things other than what he should
probably be best known for: his discovery of the third element of the
blood, platelets. Donne had a wonderful vision, and was among the very
first on the scene to write about and employ the spectacular invention
of the daguerreotype in chemistry and microscopy. As a matter of fact,
Donne, along with his collaborator Leon Foucault, produced the very
first engraved images of photomicrographs for his cytology paper of
1840. (He was also the first to use electricity in producing a medical
illustration, and was among the first modern physicians to write on the
great efficacy of mothers using their own milk in breast feeding their
children.) The discovery of platelets paper of 1842¹–preceding two
other works published in the same year–does indeed identify the new
object, but actually fails to make a methodological examination of the
new body, calling the new units “globulins du chyle” (or small globules, derived
from plasma). He also fails to make a drawing of what he saw; so, the
combination of these two important elements asked the reader to accept
his findings on faith, the tools of reproduction of his observations
not being present.

And so we remember Donne for some other significant
things, and less so for his lightly-interpreted and un-illustrated, and missing, “dots”.

Notes
1.Donne, Alfred. De l’origine des globules du sang, de leur mode de formation et de leur fin. Comptes rendus de l’Académie des Sciences, Paris, 1842, 14: 366-168.

(Overall the history of the
discovery of platelets is complicated:
Leewenhoek (1675) and Henson (1782) were the first to fully describe the “undefined”
particles of the blood; Donne’s work was then more fully described by Beale in
1850, and then again (identified as “small corpuscles” by Zimmerman in 1860 and
then again by Schultze in 1874 and Laptschinski (also in 1874). William Osler
then enters the scene in 1880, followed by Giulio Bizzozzero who was the
first, in the years 1881 -1882, to establish central role of platelets
not only in physiological haemostasis, but also in thrombosis. Anyway it is a longish and not-clear-to-me
history.)

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of — History of Dots — Medicine, History of