JF Ptak Science Books

The Healthy Coal Miner in the Pyramid of Life, or Death? 1912

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 939

This pictorial graph shows the places in the temple of Hygeia¹ of various British workers, their places on the stairs showing the possibilities of long life, or not.

At the bottom: general laborers, the backbone of the society, ranking well down beyond virtually everyone else save for dock laborers. Unfortunately the scale at left—listing the progression of health, somehow, from 500 at the top to 2200 at the bottom—lists these two groups at 2200 and 1900, respectively., then jumping at third layer from the bottom at 1300 (glassmakers).  That means that in the difference of 1700 between the top and the bottom that 90% of the classes represented were in the 500-1200 category (or a difference of 700 units) while the bottom two classes occupies the 1000 units; 80% of those represented occupy the first 500 units.   I do wish that I knew what these numbers represented. 

 

At the top of the list of health comes the clergy, followed by gardeners, gamekeepers and farmers.  Next are grocers, farm laborers, platelayers, coal merchants and barristers and solicitors. Coming into the bottom steps of the health temple are tanners, carpenters, gas workers, coal miners, millers, clerks, bricklayers, fitters, indoor servants, blacksmiths, plumbers, saddlers, tobacconists, slaters, glassmakers, fishermen, dock laborers and general laborers.  

It is interesting to note that in 1910 once a person in the U.K. or the U.S. reached the age of 60 their life expectancy was around 75; in 1850 this figure was 72.  Today the life expectancy for this same group is 83 or so. Considering the enormous advances in medicine and medtech since then--in pre-Lister 1850 days there was still no sanitization of surgical instruments, for example—83 seems hardly Kurzweilian. 

Notes: 

1.Hygeia was the goddess of good health, and the daughter and attendant of the god Asklepios, a sister of Panakeia (all cure) and Iaso (remedy) and a companion of the Aphrodite.

Heart, Head, Heresy and Burning at the Stake: a Cordial Memory of Michael Servetus on St. Valentine’s Day

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 938

Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas  George Eliot.

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.
Saul Bellow

 

No, this isn’t a story about the great saint but a much lesser one.  For centuries the pulse was a vaguely understood thing reaching back into the murky medical past as far back as Galen.  The association of course was with the heart, and the association of the heart was as the great controlling center of all function and control of the human body—a theory that reached far forward into the 16^th century. 

It is generally established that it was the fabulous work of William Harvey (1578-1657) that brought into light the idea of pulmonary circulation, but the idea was buried in a vastly-suppressed work by the brilliant and highly problematic Michael Servetus (Spanish, 1511-1553).

Servetus (physician, cartographer, theologian, writer and general all-adept Humanist of a high order) was in trouble with the church for many reasons, not the least of which was trying to dislodge the theory of the heart as sacred and the seat of wisdom.  But he did establish that the heart was an organ, which didn’t sit well with very many people, least of all the Calvinist court in Vienna which found him guilty on many anti-Humanist grounds, including his anti-Trinitarian Christology, which made him a reviled figure to Catholics and Protestants.  He was tried and found to be dangerously heretical, and sent to the flames.  (There was a practice at the time to burn people alive using wet wood, providing a slow, baking environment in which the subject was painfully nearly-baked alive before he/she was actually consumed by the flames.  People thought about this….In the engraved portrait of Servetus we see him being burned--along with his books, which are slow burning things, at upper right.  As a matter of fact Servetus' effigy was burned in some places along with his books, which explains the scarcity of some.)

Later on, Harvey withstood blistering attacks on his correct statements on the circulation of the blood (costing him nearly all the patients in his practice), though he at least lived to see a brighter day:  Servetus, on the other hand, didn’t, and was burned at the stake for his heresies, one of which his attack on the spiritual heart. (Plenty of others have paid for their insight and invention and would be later celebrated  Semmelweis wasn’t killed but did wind up in an asylum; Galileo didn’t wind up in an asylum but did wind up imprisoned; Copernicus wound up in neither place, escaping possible clerical criticisms by dying just as his revolutionary work was published.  Phillippe Lebon’s ideas for illumination by gas were seen as ridiculous, as were the revolutionary ideas of Edward Jenner and Luigi Galvani.  Einstein’s 1905 ideas weren’t happily received in France for a decade, and David Hilbert’s impressions of mathematics in the middle of the third decade of the 20^th century was that it was “done”. )

And so I think we might as well remember Servetus today at least as often as we do St. Valentine. Or multiple St. Valentine units—the name seems to have been canonized in 496 ACE in memory of several people by this name.  At least Servetus had an association with the heart in a positive way—I don’t know the Valentine/heart connection though I suspect that at least one of them had their beating heart ripped from their body. 

Well.  Happy Valentine’s Day.

Blank and Missing Things: German Submarine Importance in Graphical Comparison, 1912.

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 937

In the midst of a massive building campaign by Germany and a building-response by England the French journal L’Illustration published these two side-by-side pictorial comparisons of their two navies, which wound up being reprinted in the Illustrated London News soon afterwards in June 1912.  [Royal Navy, left; German Navy right]

 

Germany began a rebuilding campaign in 1902 which by 1908/9 was seen by the British Admiralty as a “stab at the heart” of England’s military supremacy, and so the construction wars were undertaken.  It’s a complicated period and a complex race, which I just can’t get into in a short post, so let’s just say that the Brits wound up the winners of the competition  when these images were printed in June 1912.  

The hidden element of some great importance, a trump card that would  played in just 750 days, would be the small dot-like drawings  labeled “sous marins”. These would be the submarines, and it would be the subs that would be perhaps the most significant aspect of the entire German navy.

This was true in spite of what looks like an overwhelming preponderance of subs in favor of the Royal; Navy, where the count was 68 to Germany’s 24.  It was really a question the type of sub, and as it turns out there were only 8 or 9 of the English count that could’ve been considered for blue water ops.

Germany began the war with 24 submarines in 1914; they recognized the ship’s importance and by war’s end ramped up production, winding up with 351 in total production and with 178 in action in 1918 alone. Of that overall number fully half (178) had been destroyed in combat, with another 11% sunk via other means.  There were more than 12 million tons of Allied shipping destroyed by the German sub forces from 1914-1918 (half of that in 1917). 

So these two illustrations do portray an overwhelming Royal Navy, but they certainly do not give any hit whatsoever to the coming importance of the German submarine fleet.

 

Hiding Diseases: Plague and Smallpox

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 936

“Ring around the rosies, a pocket full of posies,

Ashes, ashes, well all fall down.”

This old nursery rhyme has more to do with plague than a skipping-and-falling song, more like the Tom Wait’s version of the “Dwarf’s Marching Song” (“Heigh Ho”, see below) than anything that could ever be dreampt of in a Disney film. It was the mater-of-fact way of dealing with the vast death brought on by the various Plagues:  saying a round of rosaries to try and invoke divine intervention to keep the disease away from the prayer-mender; posies as a fragrant flower to mask the stench of those actually afflicted with the disease; and then of course the ashes from the piles of burnt corpses of Plague victims, fallen down to death. 

These two images show different aspects of segregating—if not hiding—disease.  The first is a propagandistic portrayal of a man dying of the Plague.  This snippet of plaguaganda was an ars morendi published in the 1460’s, and depicts a not-gruesome portrayal of what was generally a very gruesome death.  The inflicted lies there in bed, with sheets and a pillow, looking faint and removed in the retiring Victorian fashion (removed 400 years), surrounded by images of his faith/belief. 

I suspect that anyone who knew anything about the Plague knew that this scene wouldn’t be truthful, necessarily, but I guess if it could even momentarily confuse the viewer into thinking that the visitation of Death could be so composed in the face of this horrendous disease, I guess that’s the hope you hang onto.  There is a minor battle between the possible claimants of the soul of The Sick, but that would be going on anyway whether the coming death was relatively peaceful, or not. There wasn’t much to be done—as the feeble attempts of preventing the disease would indicate, what with choices like urine baths, bleeding, leeching, bell ringing, pus-sucking, rotten animal corpse talismans, incense burning being some of the preventative choices—so like a belief in Heaven or Nirvana or whatever, the hopeful consolation of a possibly decent dying could keep people from running amok. 

The second shows the hospital hulk Castalia, “one of the old Hospital Boats superseded by land hospitals in 1904”, which was more a floating street than a hospital.  It was a complex of five buildings nested on the hulk of the double-hulled paddle steamer Castalia—appropriately named, as it refers to the Delphian  fountain that Apollo fabricated from the nymph “Castalia” and alludes to the possibility of rejuvenation and cleanliness, or health, perhaps).  The hospital held hundreds of smallpox patients, sent there by the Metropolitan Asylum Board in an effort to stem the flow of the disease and infection rates from the rest of the population of London.  Smallpox  was still a vast killer in mid-/late-Victorian England, and given the information available at the time this was a good social inoculation by distance and segregation.  (It is interesting to note that out-of-service de-masted, defrocked and striped ships of the line were used to house prisoners (though generally prisoners of war); in particular, those kept in the East River housing American soldiers inflicted vast death tolls via maltreatment and urgently hideous living conditions.)  This really doesn’t fit with the propagandist/suppressing model of the above, and its removal did prevent the contagion from spreading, but, well, it does look like the Asylum Board was trying to hide the sick.

Notes:

Three Map Fits: a Color Map with Color and No Map, a Color Map in Black & White; AND a Black & White Map in White (only).

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 934

This confusing title is accurate without very much grant in license and tells a short and true story of three fitful maps, two of which are beautiful and one just so-so.  

  

The first map fit is featured in a beautiful pamphlet called A Century of Progress Colors and was issued by the Textile Color Card Association of the USA.(The title being a small play on the 1933 world’s fair in Chicago called “A Century of Progress”. The Textile Color Card Association was created to standardize color nomenclature and composition in industrial colors (and is still in existence.)  The map distributed the major pavilions at the fair by their dominating colors, naming those colors in the unusually-sequenced double-page key on the following pages (below¹).  I can certainly appreciate the effort and the beautiful design it produced, but as a map of the fair it leaves much (if not everything) to be desired.

 

 The second map fit belongs to a small pamphlet published by Albert Coble called Games of Colors, Kindergarten and Primary Exercises.  Its actually an enterprising little book about reaching into the minds of little ones and explaining how colors are put together and how they relate to one another.  It is unfortunate that the drawings used to illustrate the color map part of the pamphlet were done in black and white.  Which is a little on the self-defeating side.  

 

 
 

 But the finest fit of the three fits is fit number three, which is the map of the Bellman’s tale, starting the second fit of Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, an Agony in Eight Fits.

 

 

 

But the map that I think I love the most illustrates Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, an Agony in Eight Fits, and occurs in the Bellman’s tale, starting the second fit¹. It is simply magnificent. 

Then, of course, there is this:

 

Notes:

1. The key:

 

 

2. The fit begins so:

The Bellman himself they all praised to the skies-
Such a carriage, such ease and such grace!
Such solemnity too! One could see he was wise,
The moment one look in his face!

He had bought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when the found it to be
A map they could all understand.

"What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?"
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply,
"They are merely conventional signs!

"Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we've got our brave Captain to thank"
(So the crew would protest) "that he's bought us the best-
A perfect and absolute blank!"

 

Layers of Influence: Dante's Inferno and Pozzo's Perspective

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 934

I’ve written several times in this blog about unusual perspectives in antiquarian images—namely, views looking straight up and straight down.  They really don’t exist, much, in the post-Daedalus pre-flight days, what with given the difficulty of fabricating non-cartographic images from the ground.  

Next on what might seem to be a very obvious list of non-obvious interests are images with layers, levels, sections, plans, projections…sideways columnar views, locating objects in space and time. But mostly looking at things straight-on, ad then showing their relational layers.  As it turns out, these sorts of creations aren’t very much seen in the pre-modern geological era (say, prior to the 1790’s).This is a good example, an astrological man, showing the influence of the planets (and sun and moon) on the different layers of the brain:

Differentiated, say, from Richard Saunders'  Mole-map man,  (right) where facial (and etc.) moles were used as maps to determine some sort of specific actions on the organs underneath (and also by a tea-leaf divination, where the mole lines were connected and disconnected, and interpreted, according to the needs/whims of the observer):

The classic sort of image may be something like this fantastic depiction of the Inferno of Dante (shown here in the Comedia published in Venice by Gregorio de Gregoriis in 1515:

The fantastic Jesuit Andrea Pozzo published results of his researches on perspective in his Perspectiva pictorum et architectoru (1693), explaining how he was able to compellingly, unbelievably  represent three-dimensional images on two-dimensional spaces, this image showing plan and projection and profile, effectively giving you a three-dimensional cross section of the architectural element:

 

And again:

 

And of course his masterpiece displayed, which is an engraving showing the plan of a flat ceiling of St. Ingacio in which he painted his magnificent trompe l'oeil masterpiece:

 

Also in a way appropriate to this ramble is the explanation diagram by  Pozzo's found in Martin Kemp's The Science of Art, Optical; Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat, showing the imaginary depth of a deeply illusory painting on a (basically) flat ceiling surface:

Also in consideration for this area is Sir Sandford --the inventor of Standard Time--Fleming's wonderful idea for a G-o'clock world, a same-time-everywhere planet, with his 1879 diagram illustrating the earth-penetrating time principles so:

(Image source: “Time-reckoning and the selection of a prime meridian to be common to all nations” in the Proceedings of the Canadian Institute, Toronto, 1879 published by Copp, Clark)

Agricola's De Re Metallica (from the first Latin edition f 1556) displays many interesting cross sections of Renaissance mines:

 

There's much more to come in this area, of course--this is just what I had time to deal with this afternoon, though the this task is much more complicated in the 18th century world than in the 19th, when we find cross sections of the earth and  the oceans. But I'll close here, with all faults.

Bad Grandeur: Predicting Post-Nuke USA (1966) and the Loss of 76% of all Authors

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 932

[Part of the Atomic and Nuclear Weapons series.]

I think no plumb line was ever so worked with pulleys and wheels, strings and catclaws and other Rube Goldberg devices as were the demographic studies of nuclear warfare.  It is as though their compass rose had no compass, with everything centered on the center, no way out, no way in. just there.  A faceless clock face describing “G-2 o’clock” whenever it pleased.  These studies seem to me the nuclear warfare equivalent of the Bellman’s map (described earlier in this blog as the most perfect map ever constructed): a pretty polygon describing a totally blank surface.

I have a number of these things here, some of which are restricted-distribution publications, works of statistical fancy/fantasy meant for other eyes in the same community dedicated to the fancies described, a tautological audience for self-referential.

One such bit, plucked from this pile is William W. Pendleton’s A Study of the Demography of Nuclear War produced by “Human Sciences Research, Inc.” Outside of its statistical foray in survivability and the procreative prospects of the left-overs of vast nuclear exchanges, the work is a solemn attempt at institutionalizing the death requirements of nuclear combat.  The necessity of overwhelming carnage is presented in ironic and underwhelming language, the first bits of which are seen in the conclusion of pamphlet’s abstract¹:

“Cities differ in the kinds and magnitudes of change to which they might be subjected. Considerable variation in the demography of surviving populations can be expected; that variation would be related to policy decisions; and those decisions should therefore be examined for their demographic implications.” [Emphasis mine.]

Put another way, the city is the main focus of the survivability equations, and the chances of the humans being bombed in those cities would change with—god help us—the amount of bombing.

Cities differ in the kinds and magnitudes of change to which they might be subjected.

This is the key I think to understanding documents like this, making a simple foundation statement so convoluted and tortured that it and most of what follows make any sense outside of restating themselves. Which I guess is a strength.

Back to the pamphlet and the interesting table that attracted my attention.  According to one study [and for the sake of brevity I’m not going to describe the scenarios or data estimation methods and so on] the U.S. would suffer 46% casualties [meaning immediate deaths and not as a result of radiation or illness or starvation or the encyclopedia of whatever that would lead to death somewhere down the road].  The resulting demographic of the “perished” by job description postulates that the most-killed category of worker would be: (#1) aeronautical engineers, 86% dead; (#2) transportation equipment salaried manager, with 79% killed; (#3), social scientists, with 78% of them going down with their clients; (#4), authors, with 76% gone.

Authors?  Of what, I wonder?  The good ones with the bad?  Are authors different from writers?  And what do you call folks who produce tv shows?  Since the stats here are for 70 cities there’s no wonder that there aren’t any farmers in this table, as the majority target areas (some 450 cities cited elsewhere as targetable, including my own little burgh of Asheville, N.C.) would naturally have city folk in them.  And so I’m guessing that three-quarters of all “authors” in 1960/6 were living in these target cities and were going to go up in smoke.  The aeronautical engineers category is more understandable as every one of those industries employing 50 or more people would be a target; frankly I’m surprised that given the possible firepower of the Soviet Union in 1966 that 14% would survive; I’d guess offhand that the number would be 2%. 

Even though this stuff is spread out in only 98 pages or so it would keep a person busy segregating the Orwellian gems from those not; it would be a tricky business as most of the “text” in the “not” category would be largely limited to prepositions. 

Here’s another bit:  a parenthetic poke at the post-attack composition of Congress. It is stated that the “postattack” (hyphenated no longer) Congress would be “quite different”.It would also be (“in their eyes”) “more Conservative than the pre-attack (hyphenated!)  Congress.  It isn’t a cause for great prognosticational (?) liberty to assume that the Congress might be more Conservative, but why on Earth did the author qualify the assumption by saying “their eyes”?  Pish and posh.

The paper goes on its merry way, connecting the necessaries of Goldbergian delight, and somehow nothing ever happened, which to me is a secret miracle.  Especially given the weight of papers like this one, which seems to medicate the effects of war, assuming that there will be a Congress and that people will report back to work once the factories are rebuilt and that there will be more segregation in the colossal world of post-attack America, and on and on into the red dawn. 

Mr. Mencken’s view of Warren Harding comes to mind when I read this stuff and wonder about how it was that we didn’t blow the whole place up:

“I rise to pay my small tribute to Dr. Harding. Setting aside a college professor or two and a half dozen dipsomaniacal newspaper reporters, he takes the first place in my Valhalla of literati. That is to say, he writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.”

Notes

1. The abstract from the above paper: “The basic problem with which this report is concerned is that of determining the kinds of demographic change that might result from a range of nuclear attacks, ascertaining the effects of those changes on the future of the surviving populations, and indicating possible areas for Civil Defense action and planning. Earlier studies of the demography of nuclear war were examined and their relevant conclusions and methodology incorporated in the report. A different methodology--expected to be more sensitive to compositional effects--was then designed. The new methodology was tested and found to be more effective than the old. Surviving populations representing a wide range of variation in attack conditions were created on the basis of both old and new methodologies, and the demographic significance of these populations was examined. Assuming a range of post-attack demographic conditions, a series of projections was made on the surviving populations. The demographic significance of the recovering populations was then examined. On the basis of the analysis a series of recommendations relevant to Civil Defense planning was made: Within the framework of this analysis the crucial variable is the demographic pattern of the city. Changes in composition, as well as size, could be of substantial magnitude and would last for generations in some cases. Cities differ in the kinds and magnitudes of change to which they might be subjected. Considerable variation in the demography of surviving populations can be expected; that variation would be related to policy decisions; and those decisions should therefore be examined for their demographic implications.”

Unexpected Sense Impressions from Antique Prints: Sound

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 631

[A continuation of the blog series "A History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things"]

The sweetest pleasures come from unexpected sources. Mozart--who loved the game of billiards and was an exceptional aficionado¹ of the game while playing it with little skill-- enjoyed composing on the table as well,  rolling balls in geometric patterns across it while working. To observers it might have seemed as though he was interested in the patterns themselves; it delightfully turns out that what he was really looking at were the changing reflections in the surface of the balls. 

Years ago my wife (Patti Digh) and I visited an artist in his studio at the lovely high-road-to-Taos town of Truchas, New Mexico.  We watched the artist at work for quite some time—well, actually, we listened to him work.  Although he was a lovely painter, the visual impact was overwhelmed by the sounds that he made padding back and forth (he was working on a big canvas) across an old and musical wooden floor --it deeply interesting, and the sound stays with us to this day. 

I enjoy these quasi-synesthesic experiences a great deal, though they are very hard to “find”. Sometime though they slip into the print world, and I include three examples below. 

(1) Putting the Pulp in Fiction, and Fact: the Sharp First Step in Paper-Making

Just about the first step in making paper is collecting and preparing the raw materials from which the paper is made.  Linens, cottons, wood and straw (among other things) would be reduced to a pasty pulp through vigorous pounding, tearing, wetting stabbing and rending, all of which would be reduced to a pasty, fibrous pulp which would wind up after a bit spread over a wire mesh until dried and then, through a great non-miracle, becoming paper.  This is a process that was little changed in the Western world for many centuries.

The most lovely of these early pulp-rendering, “stamping” machines, to me is the fabulous two-person human-powered stamper/shredder, published in 1579. (I don’t know the original source for the wood engraving; this image appears in Charles Singer’s monumental History of Technology, from the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution, vol III.

The men turn crank, crank turns wheels and rod, rod turns arms, arms forced to move vertical poles up and down, stampers on the end of poles pound the rags.  Actually the stampers had changeable stamps so that the man-machine could start with a spiked stamper for rendering and then move to a roundish stamp for pounding into decomposition in a wooden bowl with mushy water. 

I just really like the machine and its representation, and of course the round stampers and bowls of mush.  It all seems so innocent in a creaking antiquarian way—but the great surprise for me is that I can just about hear this machine at work.  The all-wooden structure with slowing-turning wheels grinding against its constituent parts, worn smooth from use; the slow pounding of the stampers into the thick paste; the creaking motions of the too-slender superstructure.  I can hear it about as clearly as I can hear the soft/high clinking of the bottles in the milkman’s tray.

(2)  A Scene of Western Quiet

The image comes from William Wright's The History of the Big Bonanza and was published in 1877.  It is a very simple scene (“Office of the Consolidated Virginia Mine”), nicely and proportionally arranged, though somewhat challenged by its understanding of linear perspective. For reasons I don’t quite understand it might as well have been a picture of the high desert with no settlement whatsoever.  It simply seems still, and very quiet.

(3) Electrical Hum (and Ozone) Fishing Nets

This image, from the quarto edition of the great Diderot and d'Alembert Encyclopedie (published over a number of years in the late 18^th century), shows (I think) the ways to mend broken fishing nets. I have a definite sense of a high electrical hum from this, along with the added whiff of ozone.  Its hardly something that was intended by the artist, but it was the first thing that registered with me when I bought this print 25 years ago. 

Things like this are available to us all of the time, simply waiting to be heard while being seen. 

Notes

1. After his death Mozart's estate was reckoned, and the contents of his house and belongings were catalogued.  It was recorded that he had a very nice billiard table, and that he also had 12 cues.  Now 12 cues might've been there because he liked the feel of the wood, or that he liked their artistic merit on the wall or in the corner.  That, or he had a lot of people coming over to play.  I like the later interpretation.  Also, I cannot remember the reference for the ball/reflection story; please don't tell me that it is wrong.  

How to Look Pretty or Smart, but Not Both: Ladies' Home Journal Make-up Advice, 1933

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 930

[Continuing the posts What Makes Human Robot Girls, 1941, How to Get a Boy-Date, 1941, and The Missing Pieces of Women, Pope Joan and the Proper Girl]

Following on the tall heals of several posts on mid-1940's social engineering for young women comes this rougey sprite by Dorothy Cocks, Tricks with Make-up.  It is one of a long series of quickly-produced pamphlets flung from the presses of the Ladies' Home Journal under the stewardship of Elizabeth Woodward. 

There's much to learn about what was expected of the social shell of women in this pamphlet, but what I've focused on is this jewel on page 7:  "Which is Your Type: Pretty or Smart?" And that's it: no ground in-between, no space for something else, and evidently no room for being smart AND pretty.  Here it is:

 

The advice to "touch perfume behind your ears and  above your upper lip" is a new one to me. 

Small Wars: Flowers vs. Coffins in the American Occupation of Haiti, 1915-1934

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 929

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a  high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.--Marine Corps Major General and two-time Medal of Honor recipient Smedley Butler, from his 1935 book War is a Racket^.1

This small pamphlet (reprinted below in continued reading)--printed in 1929 and once owned by H.L. Mencken, and with his annotations--is a gonzo screed against  American imperialism in Haiti produced by "The People's Lobby" and headed by Prof. John Dewey.²

This “intervention”, an extension of American hegemony in the Americas known as “The Banana Wars” and a direct relation to Theodore Roosevelt’s corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (1904), was a movement taken to protect business interests, infrastructure and investment. And the Haitian debt repayment structure.

After a series of six failed Haitian governments in five years, President Woodrow Wilson felt the stinging itch of capital protection and ordered the occupation of Haiti by the Navy and the Marines, all in the guise of preserving peace and order and stability (of the Haitian state.  "The urge to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it." as Mr.Mencken wrote). But this itch had been felt by a number of presidents over time, what with the many imperialist interventions and occasional occupations of Panama, Nicaragua, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Honduras and Mexico.

The pamphlet is effective as an anti-Imperialist proto-gonzo work, though it does leave some gaping holes in fact and some narrow ones in fiction.  Be that as it may the anonymous author incites indignation with the outrages of the American occupation, not the least of which is the usurpation of Haitian sovereignty. 

The only annotations of the former owner--Baltimore’s other great writer, H.L. Mencken-- are his characteristic hashmarks in the margins highlighting the death rate of Haitians killed during the occupation.  According to the pamphlet, which quotes the report of the Secretary of the Navy (Joseph Daniels) , there were 1,861 Haitians “killed by American forces in 1919 alone”.  The writer makes the acidic point that this figure represented one percent of the total population of the nation.  And that is, perhaps, all that Mr. Mencken³ needed to see. 

The occupation of Haiti left broad scars along with the new and vastly improved infrastructure, which was probably just a colonial remnant of the necessities of governance by the occupying force. After all, we needed roads and bridges and such to secure the possession, and it isn't as though we could role them all up and take them home at the end of the day.  They were more cenotaphs to an unwanted and shameful legacy than the betterment of Haiti's social structure. To close with Mr. Mencken, the flowers that came with the American occupation make us look more for the coffins than anything else.⁴

Notes:

1. In 1935, Butler wrote in his famous book War Is a Racket: "I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

2. Just to note that this was the John Dewey, one of founders—along with the great Charles Sanders Peirce and William James-- of the philosophy of pragmatism. 

3. Mr. Mencken also made the following Modest Proposal: "It seems to me that the United States would be a great deal better off today if it had a war on its hands, somewhere or other, all the time. I do not mean, of course, such puerile buffoonery as now goes on from time to time in Nicaragua and Haiti, but real war, occupying say a quarter of a million or half a million men." "Editorials" in the The American Mercury, Nov 30, p.284

4.  As in his Bierce-like dictum "A cynic is a man who, smelling a flower, looks for the coffin".

Odd Collections: 500,000 Wishbones

JF Ptak Science Books Post 928 (from 2010, Expanded!)

"One must go into oneself armed to the teeth"--M. Teste, Paul Valery

“Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still." --H.D. Thoreau

Sometimes odd images just need to be surfaced for the pure sake of it.  Such is the case with this glorious photo by Greg Villet¹ of Delphine Binger in LIFE magazine for  24 May, 1954 .   Ms. Binger ("a Manhattan spinster") actually collected the wishbones with a business utility in mind, fashioning them into objets d'os.  (LIFE unfairly classified Ms. Binger in this way. In other accounts I have read of her she is described as a funny, fun-loving person, and Pete Hamil/Meyer Berger describe her as "generous", "bubbling" and "caring" in their 1954 Meyer Berger's New York.)

 

She purchased the wishbones for nothing, added a few bits of half-penny decorations, perfume, a pin, and SO! a piece of jewelry is born.  She evidently was able to sell her creations for $2.10 apiece, which in 1954 translates into 25 2009 dollars; so I guess if she sold some here and there she would be able to supplement her income.  Of course there's the issue of overkill on the bones:  she seems to have probably two (or more) orders of magnitude more than she "needs", so there may have been something else going on there.
  But then again, at the point where you collect 500k of anything you will have become expert enough to have any mostly-invisible nuance convey a large field of interest to your keen appreciation--the bigger something gets, the smaller it gets, in parts. 

An old friend of mine--we'll call him Mr. Tulipfields, a brilliant mathematician/physicist/compsci guy with a deep appreciation for music--started buying classical cds when cds were a relatively new phenomenon.  Rare recorded material was being placed back into "print" at such a rate that he couldn't really afford the appropriate sound system to actually listen to all of his new purchases.  He hurried into buying many of the cds because he thought that they would drop out-of-print again, and that he needed to act quickly.  I thought that the cds would stay available basically forever—as it turned out he was right (as usual) and I was wrong (ditto). And so Mr. T amassed an enormous collection of music—in the dozens of thousands—many of which are now impossible to find. 

In some ways my friend didn’t need the cd player—he already knew the music, could play it in his head.  Somehow he was keeping all of this music on course in forming this fabulous collection  And once he had explained his reasoning behind the whole effort, it all made perfect sense, and you’d wonder why he didn’t have 100,000 more choice cds.

On the other hand I’m not sure why Ms. Binger² needed her extra 497,500 bones—you'd expect there to be not very much difference from bone-to-bone, but there very well may be. A centimeter here and there may make all the world of difference and interest to the practiced eye, particularly if the bones are from many species of animals. Once a collection of almost anything gets to be that big, someone somewhere is going to be interested in preserving it.  

And that's what Ms. Binger did.

• See also this note in Popular Science from the Popular Mechanix site ("Wishbones Made Her Dreams Come True"). 

Notes:

1.  I don't know much about Greg Villet.  He took a lot of preparations for this photo, stringing 5,000 wishbones on black string on a black backdrop--that is considerable dedication to the idea of an image.  I also know that he did some very significant documentary photography with Rosa Parks and the Montgomery strikes of 1955/6, which tells you maybe all you need to know about the man.  

2.  I can't help but wonder what happened to all of those bones on Ms. Binger's passing? (She died in 1961, and I can't find anything about the disposition of the collection.  It sounds like the vast majority of the bones were kept with relatives and not in her two-bedroom apartment at 145 W. 96th St in NYC.  

The Stench of Creativity: Dante, SpongeBob & Unintentionally Bizarre Titles

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 927 [Part of the Fantastic Titles series]

Squidward: What's that horrible smell?! [sees steam coming out of SpongeBob's window] Is Patrick thinking again?

Patrick: [sticking his head out of the window] I'm making art!

Squidward: Patrick, it smells like something crawled into your brain and died!

Patrick: That's the creative process at work!

Like St. Paul warned by Archangel Michael, and Dante by Virgil, the visions of the Hell they were touring was also stinky, though the robes they held to the noses did not prevent them from experiencing the very lofty stench of sin.  Perhaps it was something like the crawled-in-and-died stench made by the beautiful Patrick starfish from SpongeBob Squarepants, his brain’s intellectual exuda forming a pretty but stench-ridden experience.

And so to with experiencing the found, unintentional absurd--or the naïve surreal—in printed material like some of the examples below.  Their title pages can be experienced as art in a way, at least today, so far removed from their original meaning and context that the words float like disembodied arks of meaning looking for whatever piece of land/meaning that they bump into.  Sometimes their titles are the bizarre-ity, masking a mundane, pedestrian contents; much of the time the title and contents emanate the stench of lost meaning through and through. 

  “… ‘Why us thy mind’, he said,
‘so far away, unlike its usual self,
 What are thy wits about, where have they fled?’
 —Virgil yelling at Dante for asking a dumb question outside the City of Dis,. Inferno, XI, 76-78

 

 

Complex Medical Treatise on Horses: Illustrations, 1685

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 926

This is a simple image-only post relating the four wood engraved illustrations from the rare Spanish work by Conde (Pedro) Garcia, Verdadera Albeyteria, printed in Madrid in 1685.  They were beautiful works, if not exactly correct, or terribly useful--not in the great traditions of veterinary (& etc.) anatomists like Andres Laguna, Leonardo or Vesalius. Oddly enough, Garcia didn't seem to draw on the very accomplished work of Carlos Ruini (b. ca. 1530-1598) whose earlier work, Anatomia del cavallo, infermit, et suoi rimedii, was a standard font of anatomical and medicinal information on the horse for 75 years.  But the illustrations are compelling, and beautiful--just not very helpful.

"...This most noble beast is the most beautiful, the swiftest and of the highest courage of domesticated animals. His long mane and tail adorn and beautify him. He is of a fiery temperament, but good tempered, obedient, docile and well-mannered."--Conde Garcia.

All image sources via the Cervantes' Virtual Library site, here:  http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra/verdadera-albeyteria/

And the bleeding chart:

A Short Look at Fifths and Fives: Joltin’ Joe, Legal Sausage and the Structure of Mathematics

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 925 

I’m going to take a drive through five fifths—all of which don’t come close to making a whole—to get to my ultimate destination, a ribbon of numbers circling the earth.

In American law, “taking the fifth (Amendment)” allows you the prohibition of incriminating yourself, giving the supposed ability to look innocent whole not saying anything about anything for fear of legal repercussions, though this sausagey implosion from guilt seldom looks pretty. 

There’s the fifth column (as in Hemingway’s play by this name), the not-fourth-but-fifth force, the musical perfect fifth of highest consonance, the Keplerian nestling of the five Platonic solids,  Beethoven’s Fifth, a fifth of (good) scotch, the fifth cardinal direction (the center), the five books of the Torah, the five pillars of Islam, the worst categorization of hurricanes and tornadoes, living in the fifth Mayan world, the fifth Fibonacci number, and on and on.

And aside from being the number that Joe DiMaggio wore on his pinstripes, it is also the number of the  Euclidean postulate that called to all those who were interested in the possibilities of the postulate not being so—that there exists as perfect a non-Euclidean system as there is for the Euclidean.  The fact of the matter is that this calls into question the foundation, the very basis, of mathematics.  Or used to.

All of this was brought into mind by this 1957 ad for the RECOMP computer produced by Autonetics.  The image of a sheet of numbers circling the earth¹, the product of digital computation, suggested structure, mathematical imperative and solidification of numbers.  But the point of this was the bottom line: what was the point, and for that matter, what was the point?  They were hardly physical things floating in space, but ideas (except of course in the worlds of Flatland). 

Euclidean structure was the infallible, rigid, predictive, explanatory structure and the most accurate descriptor of physical space.  This had certainly been the case for fifteen hundred years or so, or at least until the struggling fifth postulate of Euclid’s Elements became really, well, unwieldy.  More to the point, the axiom, the parallel postulate axiom, wasn’t as self-evident as the first four, and wasn’t provable from the other nine of the first ten axioms.  And so came the unbelievable question, what if the fifth postulate wasn’t true?  What if there were other geometries—non-Euclidean geometries—that were as provable as that of the Master?  The possibility of relegating the understanding of nature and the physical surroundings to something other than the existing geometry was simply, positively, extraordinary. 

The origins for this movement away from Euclid started with Girolamo Saccheri (his book published in 1733 but not “discovered” for its non-Euclidean importance for another 150 years) Georg Kluegel (1763), Johann Lambert (Theorie der Parallellinien, 1766) and Adrien-Marie Legendre (1752-1833, who was sort of in a similar boat with Saccheri in that his work wasn’t actually published until after that of the next two mathematicians); and coming to a point of real invention in the work of Nikolai Lobachevsky (1792-1856) and Janos Bolyai³ (1802-1860). (It would be incorrect to credit these last two men [plus Gauss] with the creation of non-Euclidean geometry given the longish and complex history of its development.)

This work brought into question the way in which the world was seen, and the very foundation of recording visualized space.  This is all much messier than had been planned (so to speak) by almost all previous mathematicians, questioning the very foundations of mathematics.  The orderliness of the earth-circling numbers doesn’t seem to be quite as they were, but as Henri Poincare stated, the “new” system isn’t anything better or worse, just different,  a new and more convenient way of looking at things⁴.

Notes

1. To be honest about it, the foundations of math bit didn’t suggest itself right away.  The first thing I thought when looking at what this paper trail was supposed to represent—a string of numbers 41 billion zeroes long—didn’t look right.  Given the size of the numbers coming out of the “printer” there would need to be five times as many rings around the earth.  But when you read the text the numbers are supposed to be “hand written”.  Therefore if you assume the numbers to be less than an inch high and with no spaces in between, then this 2.5 times around the earth works out to be accurate to the number of inches in the circumference. 
2. Still earlier work is found in the work of  Omar Khayyam's Discussion of Difficulties in Euclid, John Wallis and Nasir al-Din al-Tusi... among others.
3. Bolyai’s work—published as an appendix to his father’s work on the foundations of geometry—was privately reviewed by the great and impossibly smart Carl Gauss, who gave it a backhanded series of compliments while at the same time saying “I thought so…”  Which was true, evidently, as it looks as though he was working on the problem beginning in 1799.
4. "If geometry were an experimental science, it would not be an exact science. it would be subject to continual revision ... the geometrical axioms are therefore neither synthetic a priori intuitions nor experimental facts. They are conventions. Our choice among all possible conventions is guided by experimental facts; but it remains free, and is only limited by the necessity of avoiding every contradiction, and thus it is that postulates may remain rigorously true even when the experimental laws which have determined their adoption are only approximate. In other words the axioms of geometry (I do not speak of those of arithmetic) are only definitions in disguise. What then are we to think of the question: Is Euclidean geometry true? It has no meaning. We might as well ask if the metric system is true and if the old weights and measures are false; if Cartesian coordinates are true and polar coordinates are false. One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient.” --from:  M J Greenberg, Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries: Development and history. (1980).