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.

Maps of the Cosmos of Moles, 1671: Astrology, Pseudoscience & Furious Belief

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“The first principle [in science] is to not fool yourself.” R.P. Feynman

“The Woo-woo
is all the same, everywhere, anytime, everytime.”—James Randi on the
history of the pseudosciences .

Self-deception and belief in Woo-woo (spurious pseudo-scientific beliefs) is some of the stuff that separates humans from animals. And not in a good way, unless it was all chalked up to an expression of creativity and imagination. I started this post as an entry in the History of Dots category, then in the Blank and Missing Things department, and then simply to the Bad Ideas category. But the more I thought about mole mapping and how extraordinary it was, the less extraordinary it became, especially once the veil of age has been removed. As it turns out, mole mapping is neither more nor less extraordinary than any other system of belief.

Here’s
a sentence one doesn’t get to write very often:
Richard Saunders (1613-1692) was perhaps the foremost historian, astrologer and seer
of human moles and their predictive forces who ever lived. He was far from being the solitary member of
a one-unit class: the use of moles as
predictive and interpretive agents stretches back dozens of

centuries, so the
claim of Saunder’s being its most famous practitioner is not empty,
mega-pseudo-scientific or not. The
mystical commentary on the Torah, the Zohar (a part of the Kabbalah), gets
right to the point of the significance of moles (“the stars of the body”),
transferring the structure of the cosmos and the constellations to the
skin. The seer and soothsayer Melampus
from Greek mythology, in one of his necessarily pseudographic works, writes on
the importance of moles of the face and their zodiacal relations—an idea that
was picked up 2000 years later by the extremely significant mathematician
Jerome Cardano. There was a decent
amount of argument regarding the location of zodiac symbols on the face, as it
turned out.

But
the leading exponent of moles is Saunders, who was also one of the leading
figures in a wide and very powdery period of European non-scientific
sciences. These wonderful images come
from the second (!) edition of his cumbersome but accurately-titled work Saunders Physiognomie and Chiromancie,
Metroscopie, the Symmetrical Proportions and Signal Moles of the Body, Fully
and Accurately Explained; With Their Natural Predictive Significations Both to
Men and Women (published in London, 1671, by Nathaniel Brook), in which he
divines the psyche and the future with peoples’ moles.

The
first figure, detailing the mole locations of a man’s face, is a remarkable,
weird accomplishment, not only because of the exhaustive treatment that is
given to every location of every mole (g_d help us), but also because of the
manner of the engraving. If you look
closely, you can see that it is Fresnel lens-like—it is an engraving composed
of (almost) concentric circles. I cannot
recall seeing such a thing before—needless to say the practice of engraving
would be laborious, and not much practiced.
I’m not even sure what great good it causes, though it does give a
little different idea of depth and dimensionality to the image. The effect that it achieves here though is to
give a solar-system-like background to the moles—something that is much more
spectacularly achieved in the next image.

The
map of the moles of this woman’s body looks to me just like a constellation—and
a constellation is just what they were for Saunders, who viewed the arrangement
of moles on the body like an astronomer searching the night sky for a new
comet. But an astronomer would not be
trying to force governing connections in the starry realms to occurrences on
earth (or heaven, or whatever)—that would be the job of an astrologer, whose
job would be enormously simplified since everything it conjures is
fictional. Had Robert Hooke been Richard
Saunders-like when he made virtually the first microscopic investigations in
human history, he would have been correlating the hairs and pores of the flea
rather than making his minute and beautiful observations.

Saunders
sees mole connections everywhere, even developing sub-classifications to
sub-classes: this is seen in the lovely relational map of face moles to moles
on other parts of the body. (I like the spare curved lines most.)

This
all looks perfectly phenomenal, unbelievable even, from out here in 2009. The fact remains though that the vast
majority of newspapers in his country still carry horoscopes, and most Americans
believe in UFOs, and a not-small percentage of those folks say that they’ve
actually been abducted by Outer Space Aliens. (I calculate that from the
“first” UFO sighting near Roswell 50 years ago that a sighting has been made about every ten seconds since
then. Why all of this interest? And here’s a question among the many that I
have about this stuff–outside the astronomical chances of actually
encountering the other life forms in the universe that do undoubtedly
exist: why do these crafts, which have
spectacular, beyond-physics capacities, have little dotty lights on them?)

And
so as bizarre as images like this might look, many (most?) folks in the present
really haven’t left these ideas behind—they just get changed a little,
upfitted, retro-ripped, and outfitted with flashing lights.

In a
very long career of getting people to think in spite of themselves, James Randi (scientific
investigator, keeper of the scientific method, head of the James Randi
Educational Foundation, and formerly “The Amazing Randi” from years ago) has
one particular mythbust-lecture that I find phenomenal, with a very large “oh
my good god!” capacity for the students at the end of it–if they would but allow it. Listen:
Mr. Randi would explore the possibilities of astrology, asking the group
or class who there believed in it, taking a census of belief. He would then make a very strong, convincing
case for the application of this hope in astrology (he is a very determined and
logical speaker), and then give astrological “readings” to each member of the
group. The readings would turn out to be exact and persuasive—a second tally would be taken of believers, with
the usual results being that (unless they knew who Mr. Randi was or was already
a skeptic or logically un-needy thinker) the class would now consist of an
overwhelming percentage of astrology-believers.

Then
Mr. Randi lets the high-wind boom swing free:
everyone received the same reading. (You can see a short snippet for one of these experience HERE–Mr. Randi has conducted this lecture many times for many different audiences.) The shock of realization is palpable.

On
the telephone this morning Mr. Randi graciously explained this lovely lesson—he
also explained that even after the key ingredient of the lesson was revealed,
and even after he lectured on thought and belief and superstition and logic and
so on, that the people who had already believed in astrology would almost in every circumstance still
maintain that belief. Even in the face
of overwhelming evidence, the idea of belief was no match for fact. Truth, fact, explanation, method, logic—none
of these could put a chink in the armor of belief, and is no match for self-deception.

“The
Woo-woo is always the same, everywhere, all the time. If its not astrology its something else, the basis for all of it is the same” (my
paraphrase) says Mr. Randi. After approaching belief
systems like UFOs and astrology and mentally bending spoons and mind-reading
and on and on, Mr. Randi says that at their base, the stories have a common heritage of need.
And they’re unbendable, and certainly unbreakable, for all of those who need
the belief. There’s no room for
constructive debate and exchange in such belief systems, whether it is
astrology or creationism (I just can’t call it by its other, cleaned-up
name), as they cannot satisfy the basic tenets of knowledge growth and scientific inquiry which, according to RP Feynman, is the willingness to test your beliefs against falsity and to investigate all possibilities that might make them invalid.* Mole mapping predictions and the
fate of a life is no different from any of these other derivations in wishful/hopeful pseudosciences, either—just a different name
for the same underlying system of beliefs, though the moles are a little long in the tooth.

Anyway, creationism or astrology or life-after death–they might as well all be mapping moles.

As Feynman said:

The first principle [in science] is that you must not fool yourself — and you are
the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that.
After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other
scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.

* Feynman on the scientific method: “It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought
that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty–a kind of leaning over
backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should
report everything that you think might make it invalid–not only what
you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain
your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some
other experiment, and how they worked–to make sure the other fellow
can tell they have been eliminated “ RP Feynman quoted by Ralph Leighton, 1985, p. 341
).

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Upset in the Belly, Insanity and Murder: a Southern Interpretation, 1831

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Thomas Cooper, a merry, upper-educated intellectual called “a
learned and talented mapcap” by none other than John Adams, wrote from his
secure chair South Carolina College a translation of a rather individual effort
in explaining insanity’s connection with moral outrages. The work, published in Columbia (South Carolina) is called On
Irritation and Insanity … to which are added Two Tracts on Materialism, and
an outline of the Association of Ideas
and introduced an unusual, foreign
approach to the connection between sanity and malevolence. Brousssais’ work may not have required such
attention.

He wrote, for example:

“The causes of this morbid state consist always in
irritation of the trisplanchnic apparatus, and especially in that of the
stomach, acting on the brain. [Italics mine] This last viscus, may be such, by its normal
constitution, as to give a propensity to cruelty ; but in the morbid state it
is a sense of uneasiness perceived through the whole splanchnic apparatus,
comprehending the brain itself, which renders ideas of murder predominant in
spite of reason. This horrible perversion may be considered, as well as that of
suicide, as a species of chronic anger or hatred, which impels the individual
sometimes against himself, sometimes against other men or against inanimate
objects. We have already considered it under a subacute form in furious mania ;
but in the modification in which we now describe it, it is entirely
chronic and apyretic. In fact it may be extremely obstinate, and conceal itself
under the appearances of calm, of joy, of benevolence, until the lunatic finds
the opportunity of executing his horrible project.”

I can see these words being written by candle light.

James Cowle Prittchard early on dispensed with M. Broussais,
writing in his A Treatise on Insanity
and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind (published by Haswell, Barrington, and
Haswell in 1837, just six years after the Cooper translation) states:

“Such is M. Broussais’ theory of
these phenomena. It must be allowed that various irritations, and especially
those in the digestive organs, often give rise to irritability of temper; but
that any such state as that .which M. Broussais has
described is a cause, and even the principal cause, of moral insanity, and in particular of that intense excitement of
malevolent propensity which leads to murder and suicide, is a position which,
before it can be admitted, requires proof; and no such proof has been afforded
by the ingenious writer who has advanced this hypothesis. It must be confessed
that this subject is as yet enveloped in obscurity.”

As it turns out Broussais recommended courses of bleeding, diet, soothing drinks, applications of cold and mild purgatives to treat insanity. This went somewhat against the established regimen of treatment (but of different philosophical and theoretical approach to the idea of insanity) of Benjamin Rush, who practiced all of the above but of harsher application and with more force. Broussais at least advocated a more temperate approach to bleeding, that it not be “severe”, and that the strength of the insane not be completely diluted by massive exposures to dunking and the cold. The translator Cooper, however, disagreed with the milder treatments, establishing for the record that the hotter and harsher temperatures of the South required harsher and colder treatment. From page vi of Cooper’s [reface we read: “The Southern climate of the United States , seems to require more bold and decisive practice, than the Northern climate of Paris or London : then, to us, the therapeutics of Broussais, Begin, Coster, &c. appear feeble; but the principles, founded on the physiology and pathology of the tissues, are undeniable and universally applicable.”

Such was the spirit of the day. Broussais is not even a shadow, today: he tried to establish a connection between gastrointestinal distresses and insanity, and that was seen as futile even by immediate contemporaries. Cooper survives because of his far reach into many disciplines–his treatment of Broussais, well, is memorable for his appeal to treat the insane differently in courts of law because of what he viewed as their diminished capacities.

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Bad Ideas — Fantastic Titles
The Physician Discovers the Patient: Paul Barbette 1675

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Paul Barbette was an accomplished physician with a good touch for his patients, as we can see here in the title page illustration of his The Practice of Physik of Dr. Paul Barbette…, published in 1675. Barbette (1620-1666 or so) was a celebrated Dutch physician whose many works were more a collaboration of experiences in his practice and classic works in medicine than they were of his own thought and creation. The image of the physician interacting with his patient seems to me to be much more charitable than in other Doctor-patient images of these times.

Barbette certainly was a product of his time, writing of diseases of the upper body and treating them in the sustained manner of the mid-17th century, plus that of superstition and ancient herbals. For example, the mugwort’s “old roots pulled from under the root of the mugewart” was a good curew for falling sickness, and must be harvested on the eve of St. John the Baptist “about twelve at t he night”. He was also not afraid to use and apply “Crab’s eyes” and hog’s blood. One thing he was not in favor of, however, was bleeding. Sweating, yes, but not bleeding. Perhaps though his most important contribution beyond accumulating a vast amount of medical information was his collection o patient histories and his interactions and interviews with them during the course of treatment. A good idea today, not much practiced or so it seems.

(Yes, the physician is determining the pulse of the patient in this image. The idea of the pulse is as old as Galen but not understood until about 40 years prior to the publication of this picture with the work of William Harvey (1578 – 1657). Well it was understood about a century before that with the work of Michael Servetus, but his publication on pulmonary circulation was almost completely destroyed and its author burned at the stake for his religious temerities, so it remained for Harvey to rediscover in another century.)

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Medicine, History of
Pale Horses and the Lake of Fire: a Map to the End of the World

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There are, in my experience, very few antiquarian images
depicting the end of the world in which we see the entire globe exploding or in
pieces or in flames. This sort of image gets more play in the 20^th
century, especially after 8 August 1945, but prior to that it is really very
scarce. I own a few images that appear
in the 17^th and 19^th centuries, and another from 1929 (Das Weltbild which show a “giant ice
ball” colliding into and completely destroying the earth). . Then there is this new find, S.L. Lacy’s The End of the World, (necessarily) self-published
in West Point, Virginia, in 1941. It is a short and stocky, and bound in orange
wrappers—its spine title (The End of the
World) begs the casual reader to pull it from the shelf. It’s a simple
book—studying the Bible prophecies and revelations on the end of all things—and
it annoys and is insulting but doesn’t disappoint.

I
started to breeze through the book (back-to-front as always) and opened the
book to Chapter XIII, finding this delicious chapter heading: “The Chronological Order of Final Things”,
this being a full page pre-PowerPoint summation of the time-shrinking fireball
that is rolling inexorably towards us all.
To say that one is able to put a period at the end of the world’s flow
of time, that someone is able to identify the point in the future where the
future is no more, is “presumptive”–this in the most understated
fashion as to offend even the highest of high-Victorians’ sense of restrained
propriety. Wrapped in a comfortable
Christian chrysalis of pre- and post-apocalyptic religious certitude, Mr. Lacy
delivers his interpretation of biblical prophecy for the coming of the end,
hustling it to the front of the religious line of things to come.

It seems that in 1941 the end was beginning, and Lacy saw
all of the images implied by prophecy that were necessary to announce the
glorious final days of broad retribution. This includes the list if the ten
things indicating “the sign of The Times”, one of which (Number 5)
was “The Automobile” and another (Number 7) was “Increased
Knowledge and Travel” (announced by Nathum 2: 3,4 and old dependable
Daniel. 12:4, respectively. There’s
nothing that doesn’t fit into Daniel’s visions or revelations, though Mr. Cash
has certainly made a lovely song of them.)
When everything fits perfectly into a predictive model with no possibility
of falsification (or of proof or disproof), then the model has no validity
outside of a belief system in itself. Very tidy.

It is an annoying, cloying minor treatise, promising little
more than The Lake of Fire awaiting almost all of us, even the sleeping dead,
who would be scraped from their graves to be spit into this burning
tragedy.

Lacy does a lot of inspired interpretation and
philosophizing, much of which he doesn’t seem to bother separating from
biblical quotations—I don’t think it is intentional, just bad writing. A random
find in Lacy’s thinking dislodges the following nugget:

“Satan is in the atmosphere above the earth, with access to
heaven and earth with a circumscribed power over the atmospheric elements and
the earth including the inhabitants”.

Oh dear.

But enough of this nonsense. What brought me to this work is
the folding schematic map at the front of the book. It is a slightly complex jumble of
semi-circles and circular reasoning, and I have no interest in straightening
out this jumbled linguine. What has my interest is the dissolving Earth part of
the diagram, a part of the dead earth that comes between Calvary
and Heaven-on-Earth. What makes this
image different from the others though is that the Earth reappears—different from
its former self having been vanquished and cleansed by all consuming fire, but
the Earth nevertheless. Or something
like it. Or nothing like it.

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Damaging the Gentle Nature of Nazism: German anti-British Propaganda. 1940

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Virtue itself scapes not calumnious strokes. Hamlet
Prince of Denmark (Laertes at I, III)

A man calumniated is doubly injured – first
by him who utters the calumny, and then by him who believes it.
Herodotus

This small
pamphlet, written by the German Information Office (“Deutschen
Informationsstelle”) in 1940, wraps the good name of Nazi Germany in
a double cloth of virtue, protecting itself against the maligning and shriveling propaganda of the
British Ruling Class. At least that’s what
Josef Goebbels & Co. would have you think.
The pamphlet was printed in English by Wilhelm Greve in Berlin, and in its 28 pages outlined the history of
British “terror” propaganda in general, and of the recent “total defamations”
against Germany in particular.

Erdmann and etc.
write: “It is no mere chance that the British,
who lag rather far behind the older artistic peoples such as the Italians,
Germans and French in regard to the fine arts, nevertheless are conceded to
excel them all in one form of portrayal—namely malicious political caricature.
Presently the pamphlet was concerned with the general attack against the Nazi government
overall, but took great offense in the British attack on the “Hausfrau”, a “shameless
attack on the reputation of the women in the enemy camp…”

The pamphlet does make
its way around to “the atrocity lie”, which “so thoroughly ruins the good name
of the enemy that all possibilities of companionship with him are paralyzed”. The German propaganda office takes a very
high and imaginary high road on this one,. Claiming that it is impossible for Germany to commit acts of violence and cruelty
against innocent and defenseless people.
By the time this pamphlet was being distributed in 1940, the systemic
extermination of the Jews had begun. As
had the war.

But the Nazis were
concerned with the capacity for friendship after the war—or at least that is
what Erdmann wrote—but that was now being made impossible by members of the “campaign
of total defamation” which was mainly comprised of the members of the British
ruling class, not the least of which was Winston Churchill.

“It is impossible”
Erdmann writes of the imaginary damage done to the good name of the Nazis, “here
to form an even approximate estimate of the extent to which all the European peoples
have been poisoned by British propagandas…”

Its hard to say for whom this pamphlet was intended–perhaps everyone. The main intention was to separate the British ruling class (“caste”) from the rest of the British government–there is no mention whatsoever of the British people. Now there were pro-fascist groups alive and well in Britain (the British Union of Fascists, The Link*, and the Anglo-German Fellowship to name just a few). Of course America was far from immune to pro-Nazi feelings and political parties. (I’ve written earlier here about Henry Ford and his Nazism, and there was also no end to American-Nazi business arrangements through 1944…but that’s a different story for another time.) But the main need of the Nazis in this pamphlet was to deny all of the calumny toosed its way by the rest of the world. They just said, simply, “no”.

The pamphlet ends with a plea for decency for teh world at large following the end of the present war: “In the interest of political decency in Europe, it is hoped that the end of the present war will bring with it the possibility of such measures as will induce the ruling class in Britain to abandon once and for all their tradition of calumny. That is an essential condition for the peace and the for the political and spiritual health of Europe”.

The Nazis intended that this business of peace would be easier once the war was over, what with their elimination of the Jewish people, and tearing apart and murder of millions of Russians and Poles, and the subjugation of everyone else. At that point they would write the history, and the British calumny would simply disappear.

* “The Link boasted two dukes, the 11th Duke of Bedford, and the 2nd Duke of
Westminster. Members of the Anglo-German Fellowship included 16 peers of the
realm and the Governor of the Bank of England, Frank C. Tiarks. Many members
were also former MPs. Lord Stamp was a director of the Bank of England. Another
Fellowship member, Lord McGowan, was chairman of ICI, Britain’s
trading partner with IG Farben. Lord Nuffield, chairman of Morris Motors Ltd,
was a member of both the Link and the Anglo-German Fellowship. Perhaps the most
disturbing name among the fellowship’s members was that of Sir William Strang,
Chief Political Adviser to the Foreign Office.”

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Spectacular Gravitational Sculpture in the Rings of Saturn, 2009

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These images, released on 9 June 2009, are from the Cassini Orbiter Imaging website (here for the press release of the photo) and were made by the international-effort Cassini voyager, launched 10 years ago in August. The vertical structures (waves) that we see here in the rings of Saturn are cause dby the gravitational pull of Saturn’s 5-mile diameter moon Daphnis, which makes its home in orbit within the Keller Gap in Saturn’s outer A ring. The news relsease says that the enormous strucutres–these bumps being beween 500-10,000 feet high–are the result of the gravitational pull of the moon perturbing the ring-edge partciles as it swings by.

The photos are just stunning. They are also the first evidences showing waves in the ring structure. I think that they’re simply gorgeous. The little “ball bearing” type figure with the long shadow is Daphnis. The JPL-managed spacecraft has produced remarkable photos throughout its long life–particularly in the cases of Jupiter and Saturn, where in my opinion no sci-fi or speculative artwork has ever come close to depicting the impossible beauty of those two planets as has Cassini.

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What Things Are Not Department: Freeing Sex from Sin in A. Niphus, 1549

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I suppose that one could write about virtually anything in
terms of what that subject is not: everything
that is tangibly matter or energy could be something else, and everything not
(like shadows and thought) are the stuff of being what they are and aren’t at
the same time.

In 1549 Augustinus Niphus wrote a beautiful, not-so-little
work on the subjects of beauty and love. Niphus (or Agostino Nifo,
or Niphus Suessanus, or Niphus and sometimes Nyphus) was born in the Kingdom of Naples

around 1473, and was around 55 or so when he died in
1538-1540. He was a philosopher and
historian of medicine in the high-Renaissance sense, was a great Aristotlean
and Averroist, and proved to be an able
antagonist to the Christian churches on the subject of the blessed
interpretations of millennially-dead Aristotle.
There are some who claim that Niphus was a little incoherent on the
subject of Aristotle because, well, he taught the corpus aristotlelicum at university—but Aristotle at this point in the
Renaissance was incredibly deeply ingrained in the curricula of all
universities all across Europe, and was opne of the great basics of education. There
was no escape.

But back to love. Niphus’ Libri duo, de pulchero liber primus, de amore liber secundus was a
277-page work printed at Lyon (Latinized as “Lugduni”) by the Berigens. The publishers also provided Niphuis with a
beautiful title-page device showing the joing on hands under the watchful eyes
of Christ, a love signified with an emblem announcing “bona fide”. The book was about beauty (“pulchero”) and
love (“amore”). The first part of the
two books deals with all levels of beauty and shows derivations on the subject
from the most ancient philosophers./ The
second part, on love, begins innocently enough on the philosophical and moral
aspects of the emotion and institution, but then goes further, treating love in
all of its aspects, including psychological and physical. It is an enormously full treatment of the physiological
side of sex, which was something that just wasn’t often encountered at this time.

The main contribution of
Niphus on love/sex was this—humans have a certain psychological and physiological
disposition to sex, and how sex could not be considered sinful. Not content with controlling the poor
believing people’s thoughts with fear of eternal damnation, the church reached
right into the very bedroom, specifying that sex was sinful, an abomination,
dirty, laced with the potential of Satan himself, if not used for the purposes
of procreation. All other fruit was
forbidden under dire threat of the Lake of Fire. (And still
is: driving to the bagel store
yesterday, Sunday morning, I tuned the radio to one of the preaching shows—an easy
thing to do and sort of hard-to-miss on Sundays as I live in the Bible belt—and
someone was railing away at “Satan’s fornicators”, which was “the basis of the
Original Sin”, and on and on. I don’t
know how he got to the Original Sin part because the bagel shop is only a
5-minute drive.) So the case made by Niphus was not popular in the minds of the
social controllers—who knows what structurally-threatening powers might be
unleashed in the libidinously un-hellish enjoyments of two people?

I found this illustration in an old E.P. Goldschmidt (bookseller) catalog, and the old bookseller recognized the medical value of the work and wondered aloud why it hasn’t turned up in the major medical book collections. I wonder about that, too. Be that as it may, Niphus should really show up as one of the great educators on the function of sex, and to physiologically and psychologically announce that sex was not the sin the church would have you believe it was. Perhaps in a way, too, Niphus was among the earliest of those to release woman from thousands of years of blame as the proprietesse of selfish Satanic fornication–at least with Niphus, if sex were to be insisted upon as being a sin, there is the possibility of having two actors in the process, rather than having woman carry the blame for the entirety of the sin.

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Eat Me, Please: Simplifying the Message in Advertising

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Soon her eye fell on a little glass box that was lying under the
table: she opened it, and found in it a very small cake, on which
the words ‘EAT ME’ were beautifully marked in currants.
‘

Well, I’ll eat it,’ said Alice...

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

In the annals of advertisements whose aim it was to beseech its readers to consume its subject, Profitable Pork Production (published by the Quaker Oats Company in 1938) is perhaps the most successful in making its eatable the happiest and most contented of all the lot of Things to Be Eaten. Elevating need past the knowing eyes of the poor porker, making him/her both the object of being eaten while satisfied with that option is the ultimate and (in this case) attained goal of the pamphlet.

I’ve seen very few other pamphlets like this whose subject says “Eat Me!” with greater disregard for their own life.

What this pamphlet was really doing was selling (“delectable”) food pellets to farmers to feed to their pork to get them to market plumper than other non-Quaker Oaks pellet eaters.

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Curious, Impracticable and Useless Inventions: Gun Hats and Steel Fish, 1920

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I had started out to write this post about the Sham Paris,
the False Paris, that was being built outside Paris to deceive German bombers in WWI. Now, that wasn’t a particularly bad
invention, per se—a bit like the
Maginot Line in is way—just too much, over-the-top, short-distanced and muddied
sight.

But on the way to the images of non-Paris I came across
these few inventions as reported in The
Illustrated London News of Christmas Day, 1920. These innovations look older than 1920, to
tell the truth, but here they are.

First is the hat gun—or, rather, the helmet gun. It look as though the whole affair would be aimed
and fired hands-free. By the look of the
barrel, the thing in the helmet looks like 50-calibre, which might have an ill
effect on the neck of the shooter.

The next few images illustrate an improbable, cartoon-like
device for swimming in the high seas. It
is a ticklish-looking thing, with air outlets and propellers and such being in
the rather tender areas of the internalized man.

Lastly we come to a pipe designed with too much duct work (a
la the movie Brazil)
to deliver a cool smoke from a hot bowl.
The device below that tries to bypass the entire hot smoke issue by
distracting the smoker with a movable whirligig. I’m not so sure that Bogart
would’ve been taken very seriously as Phi Marlowe had he been (a) smoking a
ciggy with a holder, and (b) if that cig holder had a movable figure on it
that raided a sword every time he drew smoke.

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JF Ptak

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Bad Ideas — Technology, History of
The Shotgun in the Service of Natural History–Shooting Flowers

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 657

In the always summery days of summer of 1912 , Mr. F. Aumaury Talbot went hunting in the wilds of Nigeria–not horribly unusual of course, except that the man was shooting flowers from trees.

I’ve never seen a picture like this, nor have I read anything about shotgunning blossoms from on-high in a tree canopy. And that’s what the man is doing–right down to the shotgun.   Mr. Talbot (for whom an estimable cash prize for academic work in anthropology is still named) was able to collect eighty (!) new species of flowers on this trip to Nigeria, many collected in this fashion.

We read in the story about this image (from The Illustrated London News of 8 June 1912) that in the 2 June issue appeared another shotgunning-in-the-service-of-Understanding-Nature:   this time shooting butterflies. With a shotgun.

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JF Ptak

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Bad Ideas — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at
Animal Imitation, Tight Corsets, and Perdition: Physiognomy, 1873

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 658 Blog Bookstore

The fabulouslessness and learned foolishness of J. Simm’s horribly-named Animalimitationality and Mentimitativeness; or Animal and Mental Imitation and their Tendencies and Influences on Society, a Lecture, seems a poor-man’s ramble in a polysyllabic scribble. At it base, J. Simms (listed as “M.D”., and who was also the author of A New Physiognomical Chart of Character) presents a two-paragraph idea and published it over twelve pages that seem twelve pages too many. The idea is basically so: humans at time resemble animals because animals imitate what they see, as do humans. That is principally the entire deal, though it evidently was the cause of numerous lecture bookings for Mr. Simms. And what Mr. Simms talks about are the problems of imitation, the results of which are found in tight shoes, tight corsets, big hats, and bad walking, all leading to debauched society and wrecked personal dreams.

There are many things the Simms work is not. It is not a work that encompasses the social geometry found by other people later in the century–those who came across the study of people and immitation and the like legitimately, such as Gebriel Tardem Emile Durkheim, Scipio Sighele and Gustave Le Bon, for example. These folks worked with capable data and reasonable assumptions in looking at how the transmission of data and knowledge takes place between people, and sought to explain the construction of the social membrane in logical and scientific ways. They were trying to address what Marcel Proust would call (somewhat later) “a new distance between ourselves and things”.

Simms was interested in did this too, but did so in terms of how people imitated animals, and how that imitation spread to imitating people, and then fashions, and then resulting in too-tight corsets and too-tight shoes, and wanton neediness, all eading to advanced imitation and, finally, to perdition. The man had an odd vision which obviously appealed to some. And so it goes. There’s not that much difference in the set of assumptions of Simms and those of Dr. Freud, is there?

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JF Ptak

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Bad Ideas — Blank and Empty Things; A History of