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.

Waiting for the Atomic Goodbye: Yucca Flats, ca. 1955

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This indelible image has two big residences
for this blog, as follows:

Perspective 1: Waiting to Say Goodbye Department, part
2.

Yucca Flat
is a big, wide place in the desert,
about 65 wide-landscape miles northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada.
As part of the Rhode-Island-sized Nevada Test Site (NTS) it is also the
most irradiated and radiation-polluted place in the country. It was the site of some 749 nuclear tests–about
80% of all the nuclear tests carried out at NTS. And it shows, and will show,
pretty much forever.

This remarkable photo of a test shot
was made at Yucca in the mid-1950’s—in the dark. Actually it was dark, pre-dawn before the
viewing station of observers was completely, Georgia-O’Keefe-like illuminated
by the brilliant explosion. The people
here were gathered at “News Knob”, about seven miles away from the detonation
point, and all wearing dark, welder-strength goggles to prevent the blindness
that would’ve occurred if they looked at the explosion without protection—best
yet was to wear the goggles and have your back turned to the flash (as some in
this picture did).

This is perhaps the greatest single photo demonstrating the power of nuclear
explosions. You can see the devastating effects, and the giant rising mushroom
clouds and all, but they’re like photos of the Grand
Canyon—nothing really captures the essence of the thing. This image makes the entire idea somewhat “habitable”,
graspable, in a weird, visceral way, placing the power of the event in an
imaginable context.

Perspective 2: Where to be and Where to Look Department; Turning Around.

This is another monumental photographic image in the turning-completely-away-from-what-everyone-else-is-looking-at
department, following such massive images as Ed Clark’s iconic FDR
photo. Just as Mr. Clark pointed (see my
post from last year), the picture to be made was not the newsreel shot of the
President’s casket being borne to the train, but it was in the face of the
accordionist, who Mr. Clark found by turning away from the scene being recorded
by a hundred other photographers. It was
his picture that told the emotional story of that evident. Just as is the case with this anonymous,
undated photo from the test shot at Yucca, bringing the unimaginable back to some degree of human understanding.

Notes:

Photo from Frances Fralin, The Indelible Image, Photographs of War, 1846 to
the Present, based on a show at the Corcoran Art Museum, Washington DC, 1985,
and published by Harry Abrams.

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Liverpool, the Battle of Britain, and Alois Hitler, 1940-1942

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It is ironic that the last day of blitz bombing against Liverpoolin WWII claimed the house at 102 Upper Stanhope Street, the home of
Alois Hitler (Jr.) (1882-1956), Adolf’s brother. Alois and family survived because they were at the delivering end of this effort–Berlin–during the war, Alois serving beer throughout the course of the conflict to happily favored
stormtroopers. But at one time before
WWI the Hitlers lived there at #102 until abandoning England for the Vaterland. There is a long and unsubstantiated rumor
that Adolf lived there too in 1912/13 attempting to avoid Austrian conscription,
but that claim seems entirely unsupported to historians, though it has proved fertile imaging ground for the theater.. Alois Jr. seems to have been a violence-prone
washout, and unwanted and unacknowledged by his half-brother, winding up with far
right wing proclivities post-war. When those plans fizzled, he signed photos of
his brother for tourists for a few dollars each, providing a bit of his own surrealist-concrete theater. He did contribute a son—Heinz Hitler–to the war effort. Heinz, Hitler’s nephew, was taken prisoner in
Operation Barbarossa and sent to Moscow’s 17^th-century Butyrka prison, a truly evil place, which was
once home to 20,000 “political” prisoners taken during the Great Purge, among
much else. Heinz melted into the stone
after months of interrogation, which must’ve turned into sport after the first
few days.

That’s not what I wanted to write about here, though. It is the image of the crowd on the back
cover of this pamphlet, Your City, a citizen’s guide to Liverpool,
published in October 1945. It seems to
me that the crowd scene here numbers about 4000 people, which is representative
of the number of Liverpudians killed between 1940-1942 in the German air
attacks on the city. Liverpool was the
second-most lethal city to be in during the war for air attack (following London’s losses of better
than 30,000), due to its importance in the production of war-necessary goods.

In a true stiff upper lip, deeply old-school, and very highly admirable fashion, there is no mention of the
war, no mention of damage from air raids, no mention of anything untoward. No photos of anything bombed out. Nothing.
This was also pretty much in line with the official reporting on the
bombing, which for obvious reasons was greatly downplayed in the press. (There is no need to provide free reporting
on the effectiveness of your enemy’s bombing campaign to the enemy.) This was a simple vision of the future, and a call for all citizens to register a concern with the proper functioning of their city.

The large crowd scene struck me as a very quiet memorial to
those killed in these terror attacks.

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Blank and Empty Space: Tobias Stimmer’s Spare Portraits

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This is part of a continuing series of posts on Blank, Empty and Missing Things.




































Paolo Giovio’s (also known as Paulo Jovio, 1483–1552) Elogia vivorum bellica 
virtute illustrium (or "Praise of Men Illustrious for Courage in War") published 
in 1554 and Elogia virorum literis illustrium (1577) are two of the most 
beautiful woodcut productions of the later 16th century. They were illustrated 
galleries, a sort of supra-advanced Renaissance LIFE magazine of famous 
people in the arts and military. They were, in general, the first time the portraits
of the vast majority of these 180+ people had been seen in a printed forma, 
the mysteries (if any) of their appearance revealed to the public. The work was 
more than thirty years in the making, with the woodcuts (after the paintings by 
Giovio) being worked by Christopher van Sichem, Bernhard Jobin and the great 
Tobias Stimmer. The portraits included authors, poets and various other 
humanists, as well as military people and their support, plus natural scientists 
and medical people. 

I like these images because of their determined simplicity—at least the portraits 
themselves were simple (done with a real respect for open, blank space), though 
the borders were anything but. This portrait by Stimmer,for 
example, shows very wide spaces of white, un-tapped pieces of the woodblock, 
leaving them open for interpretation.

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Paradise Alley: Slavery in Alaska, 1899

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The Klondike Gold Rush, or the great Alaskan Gold Rush, took place at the very tail end of the 19th century (starting 1896/7) along the Klondike River near Dawson, Alaska. It was a wild, woolly (literally) time, with communities of thousands springing up in just a few days–Klondike itself grew almost immediately to 40,000, stretching all human services, food being the scarcest commodity.

One service to humans that was ably met was sexual, filled by legions of prostitutes, some of whom arrived in the Klondike of their own free will, and others, not. This photo, made near Dawson, shows “Paradise Alley” (behind front street) an almost-overnight series of rough-hewn log bungalows sweatily constructed for lonely needs. There were evidently 70 of these little huts, all in a row, each with the woman’s name above the door, presumably rendered in chalk. (It seems that the photos I’ve seen of women in the Klondike show many smiles, but no toothy ones.)

This is a detail from a photo seen in Pierre Berton’s The Klondike Quest (a big, beautiful book of high rank for a popular history, interestingly published with a more shouty title in America as Klondike Fever) showing the working women of Dawson working at other trades. I particularly like the picture of the high-collared white-dressed angel-woman witht he axe on her shoulder…and the woman behind her, under the make-shift cloth awning, her hat tiled forward and her hand jauntily on her relaxed hip.

Prostitution wasn’t legal, nor was gambling or the encyclopedia of con games that evolved here–but all certainly flourished, with many fortunes made outside the gold fields. Mr. Pantanges started his movie house empire here, and Donald Duck’s Uncle Scrooge started his pile of money bags, as did many other people. But the 12.5 million ounces of gold wasn’t exxactly distributed with equality to the dozens of thousnds, and probably hundreds of thousnads of people who came to the Klondike looking for their fortunes. I’m certain that in this vast game of winners and losers, there was moreof the later and less of the former.



This image of miners waiting to register their claims gives us a pretty decent idea of the clientelle available to these women. Oy. Seems to me an impossible way to live–for the women, that is.



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Snowflakes and Fort Construction–Scamozzi & Palmanova

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My apologies for the formatting problem below–Typepad again has struck with its incongruities. Again. Did I mention “again”?)

Vincet Scamozzi, a gifted and powerful architect
(and whose portrait appears, weirdly, disjointed and floating and entirely out
of place in the frontispiece to his famous book, completely separated from the
connectedness of his work) was also the designer of this gorgeous star “fort”
at Palmanova, in northeastern Italy—mainly
the Turks—but nothing ever threatened the place. Until Napoleon, that is,
who took the town without a flight in 1793.

This is actually a plan for an entire town, the brainchild of its Venetian benefactors,
the very essence of which was fortification, repulse, security and defence. An
18th century Maginot Circle, so to speak—it was a perfectly designed
system for a fortified town for the time in which it was designed (1593).
It was supposed to stand to face the enemies of Venice I
wonder if anyone derived inspiration in fort design from snowflakes? It
seems a little doubtful, perhaps, since snow wasn’t dealt with in scientific
detail until the every busy Johannes Kepler wrote his treatise on the six-cornered snowflake; and it also wasn’t seen under a microscope in its fabulous detail until 1665 by Robert Hooke. This was also about the time that modern canon tech was about to
make these sorts of designs not terribly practical. [Just last week I mentioned
that a fort on the island next to the island that my family vacations on,
Tybee, just south of Savannah , is home to the first rifled canon attack on a stone fort—the result was brutal and definitive,
the day of the fort was done. Until of course the tinny home fort was invented
by the American federal government to protect hundreds of millions of people
form devastating nuclear attacks by building steel and stone bunkers under a
bit of earth in the backyard, making every person their own bit of royalty, reigning
over one’s grave.

But that’s another story. Kepler thought very
deeply about snowflakes as a result of a serendipitous encounter with one—his
sympathico correspondence with a snowflake on his coat led to him publishing
(in 1611) a short treatise called A New Year’s Gift, or On the Six-Cornered
Snowflake, thinking that perhaps the snowflake’s six-cornered symmetry
revealed something much deeper about the basis of nature and the universe. He
was racing himself towards a significance of the facultas formatrix, or
morphogenetic field, and its relationship to everything else, as Kepler was
looking for a great pattern, his own 17th century Grand Unified Theory. The
26-year-old Robert Hooke seems to be recognized as the first to throw the
snowflake under a microscope, publishing drawings of them and just about
everything else that he saw in his monumental (and tall, being 13-inches high)
Micrographia (1665)–the first truly scientific book of modern times.
The largest of the large images was saved for the flea, showing the
unsuspecting public the great and beautiful nature of what seemed like a
fantastical beast (under magnification). Snowflakes appeared in the book,
revealed in their intricate and seemingly-symmetrical nature. They were
fantastic, not-yet imagined images. In between these two giants was
another–Rene Descartes–who was actually the first to render a relatively
accurate pre-microscope image of a snowflake and did some very good thinking
about their structure.]

Perhaps though it is the opposite, perhaps most of these pre-Renaissance Western European forts do bear resemblances to snowflakes, though without attribution. (I just did a quick google search on some of the major writers on the construction of forts, and “snowflake” makes not one appearance.) Of course there is no mention of any biological acuity in ancient and near-ancient city plans that bear striking resemblences to human biological units. I guess you really don’t need to have any idea about on the subject of crystal growth or know what super-cooled cloud droplets look like in order to design something that looks like one…

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Gorgonzola Cheese, Red Wine, Lemon Soap. Joyce’s “Ulysses”.
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I just came across these image that I made on a trip to Dublin some years ago. Carrying the bags for my wife, Patti Digh, who was actually working there, I described my own work by going on a Ulysses tour. It was Sweny’s and Davy Byrnes (seems like two e’s are missing there, no?) that I liked the most–particularly so for the chemists, because it looked as though nothing major had happened in there in years, or at least that was the sense of the smallish creaking shop. I wanted some lemon soap.

Sweny’s is described by Brendan Kilty in his book on the great chemist’s shop, called simply Sweny: “It is the epiccentre of some extraordinary events in literature and history. If you stand at Sweny’s door and describe a circle with a radius of 100 yards give or take you will find your North point outside the birthplace of Oscar Wilde on Westland Row and your South point at his home at No. 1 Merrion Square. To the west, you will still find the faint paint of Finn’s Hotel on the gable of Lincoln Place. Nora Barnacle, James Joyce’s lover and ultimate wife, worked here as a chambermaid and it is from the front door of Finn’s Hotel that she spied on Joyce as he stood outside Wilde’s house when she deliberately stood him up on the evening of the 15th June 1904.”

Some of the uses of Swenys in Ulysses occurs as follows:

“Sweny’s in Lincoln place. Chemists rarely move. Their green and gold beaconjars too heavy to stir. Hamilton Long’s, founded in the year of the flood. Huguenot churchyard near there. Visit some day.”

And also the following:

“THE SOAP: We’re a capital couple are Bloom and I. He brightens the
earth. I polish the sky.
_(The freckled face of Sweny, the druggist, appears in the disc of the
soapsun.)_

SWENY: “Three and a penny, please.”
BLOOM: “Yes. For my wife. Mrs Marion. Special recipe.”

“At that point, the time I was there, you could still buy lemon soap–loose, or three to a small wooden box. I still have mine and it still has a fine scent…”

Then there’s the lovely Davey Byrnes pub, which makes a number of appearances throughout the book.

“He entered Davy Byrne’s. Moral pub. He doesn’t chat. Stands a drink now
and then. But in leapyear once in four. Cashed a cheque for me once.”

And then there is:

Davy Byrne came forward from the hindbar in tuckstitched shirtsleeves, cleaning his lips with two wipes of his napkin. Herring’s blush. Whose smile upon each feature plays with such and such replete. Too much fat on the parsnips.
“–And here’s himself and pepper on him, Nosey Flynn said. Can you give us a good one for the Gold cup?
“–I’m off that, Mr Flynn, Davy Byrne answered. I never put anything on a horse.
“–You’re right there, Nosey Flynn said.”
“Mr Bloom ate his strips of sandwich, fresh clean bread, with relish of disgust pungent mustard, the feety savour of green cheese. Sips of his wine soothed his palate. Not logwood that. Tastes fuller this weather with the chill off.”
“Nice quiet bar. Nice piece of wood in that counter. Nicely planed. Like the way it curves there.”
“–I wouldn’t do anything at all in that line, Davy Byrne said. It ruined many a man, the same horses.”
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Paul Klee, Henry Darger and Puppets, Real and Imagined

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While he was serving in the German army, Paul Klee’s 1917 journal entry (#1032) contained this pearl, coming being advice from his sergeant to him and the rest of the non-com grunts: “Let’s not kid ourselves, at our workshop– you won’t get ahead. There you’ll find advancement.”

Klee (born in the same year as Einstein and died in the second year of the European War, 1940) was a leading and inventive modern painter, who along with Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky created the Blaue Reiter movement, and who worked in close proximity to many of the major art movements of the new era. He was an iconic, creative artist of vast influence.

What struck me today was this image of Klee’s hand-made toys and this seldom-seen image of the puppets he created for his boy, Felix, around 1922. (Felix was 13, Paul 43.) Evidently Klee made 50 or so of these puppets, 30 of which have survived. They are lovely and whimsical and are examples of quick, creative work with found and manipulated objects. I can certainly visualize Klee getting drawn into the project—his diaries too show that he was interested in his son’s development, taking note of the different small, developmental things that lots of folks can miss when their child is growing up. The puppets are intimate, made for his son for play, and are composed of bristle and bone and nutshells and electrical outlets and bits of gingham and cloth and wire and buttons. Stuff from the junk drawn or whatnot box. Klee did construct more elaborate puppets for his connection with the theatre, and of course was also a sculptor. But I do like these little puppets, much in the same way as I enjoy the small toys made by Alexander Calder for his kids.

And somewhere in there imagining Klee getting a little lost in constructing these puppets arose the image of Henry Darger, the severely-imaginistic, primarily invisible-in-life outsider artist who found his fame in post mortem glory. Darger’s (1892-1973) work—and life—were discovered only after his death, when his apartment in Chicago became an archaeological dig by his landlords, and his massive and outré output became “discovered”. The process of discovery seemed not to interest Darger in life, as he had extremely limited contact with people and was basically an Invisible in work, pushing mops and brooms for most of his life to make his rent. In the meantime, in the lifetime not at work, Darger was very busy in his own created world, typing out a 15,000-page novel/world called The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion… (This is just one of his works of fiction—another is a 10,000-page work called Crazy House: Further Adventures in Chicago, and another is a work of autobiography (?), where Darger spends 200-odd pages on his early life before slipping away into a 4,800-page diversion on a tornado called “Sweetie Pie”.)

His artwork was primarily concerned with this constructed environment of the Vivian girls, and I must say that it is fascinating to me, but only forensically—I don’t “enjoy” it per se, even though it is phenomenal, and fantastical. The subject matter—often veering into bestial brutality towards children, with lots of dripping redness–is just too deeply twisted and disturbed for me to enjoy, though I do have an appreciation for the stuff that surrounds it all.

And so what does this all have to do with Paul Klee and puppetry?

Nothing, except in a fiction that I’ve had in my head about Darger (pictured at right) for as long as I’ve known about him, and which is also wholly unsupported by fact or reasonable supposition. Listen: from the first moments that I knew of him, I pictured Darger returning to his rooms at night after a day of cleaning, mopping, scrubbing, taking abuse for spills not cleaned, and then reliving the entire day at night in miniature. In my own story, Darger created small figurines and puppets through which he re-enacted his day, complete with sets of the rooms in which he worked. Perhaps he lost himself in these moments, finding a vindication in miniature stages in his second-story walk-up that he couldn’t in his daily life, allowing his creative, 50,000-page nighttime imagination to open up.

That’s what I had in my own head when I saw the image of the Klees’ theatre, and puppets. Certainly my Darger idea is not what Klee had in mind; nor is it anything that was in Darger’s mind, either. Just mine.

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Great Sceintific Understatement Department: Isaac Newton as the First and Only above Equals

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Earlier in this blog I’ve addressed some great understatements in the history of science and technology. For example:

–the Wright brothers’ telegram to their father on the successful flight at Kitty Hawk, telling him to “inform Press” [sic], and misspelling Orville (“Orvelle”)

–the announcement of the invention of the telephone, giving Mr. Bell a scant 200-word mention in the London-based journal Nature.

–the alpha and omega element of the severe understatement of George Gamow on discovering the background radiation of the Big Bang.

–and the atomic bomb/nuclear Armageddon bit from the National Emergency Planning Council: ( “Because of recent changes in the technology and potential tempo of war and because of the base power of force is in being (including equipment and supplies), there is general recognition that any future war in which the United States is engaged, especially if it is an unlimited nuclear war, may be decided without significant additional military demands upon the nation’s industrial economy.” Hmm. He continues: “That is not to say, however, that the post-attack economy would not face enormous logistical support problems.” There is no human element of this equation. “The logistic requirements of survival and recovery would present very heavy demands.”)

It is rare to see such terrific understatement concerning some of the scientific worthies, but this one (below) found in a penetrating, interesting and very entertaining work Devices of Wonder (2001) is really pretty remarkable. The book illustrates an exhibition co-curated by Barbara Stafford (Chicago), and the passage comes in a part of the book by Frances Terpak. I hate to take someone to task like this, particularly having written such a fine book, and further hate to drag anyone over coals that at all times wait for me, but Terpak’ description of Newton’s accomplishments as “innovations” (page 194) goes far beyond the line. Within two sentences she does discuss Newton’s “monumental” stature and “great experiments”, but alas the cat is out of the bag. If Newton’s Opticks and Principia and et cetera are “innovations”, then virtually nothing else is; everything else being at least not-innovations, identifying a world of sameness. I know that this is a simple editorial oversight, but it is a big one, at least in my head, and does fit perfectly (even if by mistake) into the blog’s “great understatements” topology.

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Isaac Newton’s Disappearing Name, 1711

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. I wrote briefly yesterday about a vast
understatement on the work (“innovations”) of Isaac Newton lifting so little
that virtually nothing else could exist, a black hole of a description of his
life’s work. An editorial oversight, I
am perfectly sure. I doubt that there is
anything that I could actually add to the massive amount that has been written
on the great and irascible man, though there is something that has stayed in my
head for a long time without any real satisfactory answer. Of the three superb, revolutionary works by Newton, only one features the author’s name in
near-fullness on the title page (Principia, 1687); the next, Opticks (first edition,
1704), appears with only his initials (“J.N”) at the end of the preface; and the third, his full
treatment on his invention/discovery of the calculus (Analysis per Quantitatum Series, Fluxiones ac Differerntias cum Enumeratione Linearum,1711), appears with
neither name nor initials. The
illustration on the front page features what may or may not be pure holy light
emanating from the face of the creator; or is it Newton himself? It certainly looks like the old
man, and among all of the great scientists and mathematicians of the modern
age, Sir Isaac’s image is the best deserving of such an elevation.
In any event, I wonder why the disappearance of the name–it was not a
standard practice, and the most immediate answer to me is that it was a
(deserved, Leibniz notwithstanding) conceit. I’m not sure.

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The Origin of British Bug Books

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The first book printed in England relating to bugs and bugiana, the first entomological work, owed its life to a
considerable bibliographic heritage, and also offered up the beginning of a
nursery rhyme

perhaps more repeated than any other over the last 470
years. The book (Insectorum sive Minimorum Animalium Theatrum: olim ab Edoardo Wottono.
Conrado Gesnero. Thomaque Pennio inchoatum: Tandem Tho. Moufeti Londinâtis
operâ sumptibusque maximis concinnatum, auctum, perfectum: et ad vivum
expressis Iconibus supr…) was “by” Thomas Moffett (or Muffet or Moffet),
who acquired it after a number of others had, and after others had written (most)
of it, as we see in the title, with the appearance of the names Gesnero (“Gesnero”),
Thomas Penny (“Thomaque Pennio”), and Edward Wotton (“Edpardo Wottono”). It is a considerable work very long in the
making, and has hundreds of small and delightful illustrations, not the least of
which is the appearance of the millipede on the book’s title page, which is my
principal attraction here.

Mr. Moffett’s child, Patience, is* the Little Miss Muffet of
the nursery rhyme.

Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet,

Eating her curds and whey;
Along came a spider, who sat down beside her
And frightened Miss Muffet away.

*Or
perhaps not. Patience was his stepchild
who probably did not share her stepfather’s fascination for bugs and spiders;
and as much as I like the idea of Patience being the model for the rhyme, she
doesn’t reach far enough into the future, what with the first printing of the
rhyme appearing in 1805. But it does
make a good story.

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Odd Things on Title Pages Department: Circumcision, 1507

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When Johannes Pfefferkorn (1469-1523) was released from prison he rushed himself into a conversion to Christianity (having come from a Jewish family in Nuremberg) and published a notorious diatribe against his former people. Speculum Adhhortationis Iudaice ad Christum, which was published in 1507, savaged the Jews, calling for immediate

conversion to the recognition of Christ as savior, giving up all banking concerns, and throwing out the Talmud. It packed a lot of sneering speculation into a mere twenty pages, and was one a of a number of anti-Jewish pamphlets (also including his en ihr Ostern halten (1508); Judenbeicht (1508); and Judenfeind (1509)) in which Pfefferkorn unleashed horrible prescriptions. He came to believe that the best way to deal with the Jews was to kill them, convert them, expel them, or enslave them; that was about it. He waged a successful campaign against the Jewish intellectual life by convincing the Emperor to allow the confiscation of all Jewish books (except for the Old Testament), embarking on an extended tour of Germany to do so. At the bottom of it all, he thought that the best way to deal with theological issues that opposed his own was to crush the believers and steal their books.

Of interest to me here though is the remarkable woodcut on the title page. On a very wide crucifix we see the blood of the bleeding wounded Christ pouring itself into a baptism font, with eight (or so) praying people waiting to avail themselves of it, including the onlooking attention of the Virgin Mary and a Pope (Peter?). In the foreground is a dismal portrayal of a group of Jews, showing them small, gnarled, without benefit of vision and legs. At the extreme bottom left is the circumcision, he only time I can remember seeing such a thing on a title page. It was an awful visual propagandistic juxtaposition, a fitting illustration for an awful pamphlet.

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