JF Ptak Science Books

When Did "Are" Become "Is"? Beautful Mathematics, 1836

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post
 

This beautiful table appeared in Roswell W Smith's Practical and Mental Arithmetic, on a New Plan, in Which Mental Arithmetic is Combined with the Use of a Slate..., which was a soaringly successful book, this being the 53rd edition (!) and printed in Hartford in 1836.  (Smith was a busy man, writing several other standard and widely distributed works in geography and grammar).

But what we find here, in one of the many tables in the book, is the surprising "3 times 3 are 9" rather than what we normally hear in the U.S. as "3 times 3 is 9".  Perhaps what we are saying is "three threes are nine" or "seven threes are twenty-one", and so perhaps this really should be "are" rather than "is", except in the case of a number multiplied by one, when we would use "is" (as in "1x3 is 3", or "one three is three"). This would not be so for "3x1" where we are saying "three ones are three"). 

We can also disregard both of those words and simply say "equal". Or is that "equals"?

Its a small thing, I know, and I was attracted to the beauty and simplicity and assurance of the table--it is simply a finely designed thing.

The Next-Most Obscure Reference to the Beginning of American Involvement in Vietnam, 1954?

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1957

Five years and 2,200 posts ago, in the young pages of this blog, I wrote a short bit on what might have been the most obscure and removed reference to the American involvement in the Vietnam War, here. It appeared in the 5 April 1954 issue of the Atomic Times, which was a newspaper of sorts produced by the U.S. Army and printed on a mimeographed, single-sheet page, and distributed at the tip, or bottom, of a very skinny piece of nearly-circular land far out in the Pacific Ocean at Eniwetok Atoll, 5 April 1954.  The piece of news related to the hoped-for victory of the French Expeditionary Force in the doomed garrison of Dien Bien Phu: “French troops have been parachuted into the Indo-Chinese fortress of Dien Bien Phu to join weary defenders in their battle with the Communists. French officials now have a high hope pf a French victory, and they say the Communists cannot possibly continue their assault unless they receive thousands of reinforcements”. Of course, this was not the case, and the French were badly defeated there, spelling out the beginning of their end in that country and about the earliest beginnings of American involvement in their place. 

Then a remarkable thing happened. I was reading in a small cache of mimeographed newsletters called The Parry Island Breeze, which was also produced by the U.S. military (Army engineers?) on Parry Island, which was just down the end of the long arm of slender island from Eniwetok in the Marshal Islands group.  This issue (volume 16, No. 5) was released on 6 April 1954, and it was--like the Atomic Times--a legal sheet printed on two sides.  In the second column, for the day following the Atomic Times notice, we see the following:

Again! There was no victory in sight for the French at Dien Bien Phu in April, and only misery and heroism and bitterness and death and division lay ahead in the coming month, and then too in the coming decades.

In the first week of April ,1954, the French garrison was just about conquered--there would be one more month of agony to endure before the Vietminh would claim full victory.

After an eight-week siege, the garrison was defeated. Badly. Brilliantly. The French were overrun by the Viet Minh forces on 7 May 1954, effectively ending the First Indochina War and the French presence in Southeast Asia came to the end. And here, probably cranked out by hand in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, on a narrow bit of land separating vast collections of ocean, on long narrow strips of earth from which many nuclear tests were conducted, news reached the soldiers and sailors stationed here about the coming French victory in Vietnam.  Of course not even the French knew at the time that the Vietminh army was tunneling its way through the mountains surrounding the garrison, carrying up large cannons in small bits and pieces up through "impenetrable" jungle mountain slopes to install into those tunnels once they breached the other side of the mountain so that they could fire down onto the French.  All of that was yet to come.  In April, there was a certain bit of hope, but I think in reality it was on fire.

Telephone Cowgirl

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

For an interesting side-bit on introducing the telephone for popular use, see my earlier post, The Magnificent Mundane: an Instructional With Prop on How to Use the telephone, 1946, here. 

Geology of Food Lust, 1948

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

I wrote earlier in this blog about the geology of meat and want, the last in "States of Perfection: Refrigerated Food & the Archaeology of Meat, 1954" (here).  ("Like Greek statues, orders of architecture, the golden ratio and Vitruvian man, these ads from LIFE Magazine in 1954 measure a sort of highest-attainable-state, though directed at middle class America....") This is a continuation on that theme, a little, as I found this interesting piece of a refrigerator ad in LIFE magazine for 26 July 1948.  Art Linkletter interviews two women and a refrigerator here, introducing the new G.E. Electric Space Maker, which must've used a new motor to make more space available inside the new unit, as it wasn't much bigger on the outside than the old one.  But seeing the food displayed on the ground in front of the refrigerators shows us what people wanted to have in their house, to eat--and what more of it they could want.  Side-by-side:  normal want, and advanced want. 

Milestone Papers in the Physical Review Letters, 1958-1969

Physical Review Letters Milestones  1958-1969

Data re-ordered and summarized from much lengthier, reviewed and abstracted summaries from:
Letters from the Past - A PRL Retrospective
Gene D. Sprouse
Editor-in-Chief, APS

1969    High-Energy Inelastic e-p Scattering at 6° and 10°
E. D. Bloom, D. H. Coward, H. DeStaebler, J. Drees, G. Miller, L. W. Mo, R. E. Taylor, M. Breidenbach, J. I. Friedman, G. C. Hartmann, and H. W. Kendall
Phys. Rev. Lett. 23, 930 (1969)  NOBEL 1990 

A Note on the Lunar Cycle, Time, and North American Indians

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1957

For the most part Native Americans of the pre-U.S. had no names for days, no division of the week, nor a name for years, though underscoring the observation of the skies and the passing of time was a primary appreciation of a more sophisticated lunar cosmology. Simply put, the lunar cycle was one of the major ways in which Indians captured spent time. Days, weeks and travel distances were in general measured in terms of nights passed, or sleeps (similarly the length of the day in terms of the four major daily appearances of the sun and moon). The passing of the year was marked in lunar cycles, and delineated important, measurable, repeating events in the environment important in the life of a tribe. (These events—harvests, plantings, snows—would vary from tribe to tribe according to their geographic distribution.) 

Einstein--(A) List of Complete Publications; (B) Most Often Cited Papers, & (C) Contemporary Reviews (D) In the Annalen der Physik

JF Ptak Science Books   Reference Post

• Below are three quck reference lists regading publications of Albert Einstein. Section A is a complete list of his works; Section B, a list of hi smost ofte-cited papers; Section C is a collection of some contemporary reviews of papers published 1904-1920; Section D is a listing of Einstein papers in the Annalen der Physik

A) Quick Complete Publications of Albert Einstein, Listed Chronologically.

[Titles are in English]

1901 ANNALEN DER PHYSIK 4(3):513-523
Conclusions from the capillarity occurrences       

1902 ANNALEN DER PHYSIK 8(8):798-814
The thermodynamic theory of the potential differences between metals and complete dissociation solutions of their salts and a electrical method towards the probing of molecular power      

Questions Answered with Guts, Wax, Bumps and Glory: Fortune Telling Patent Devices

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1956

 

[All images via the lovely and easy to maneuver Google Patents here]

Fortune telling and divination is mostly the subject of the pretty patents (below), a quick penny-ante for the fulfillment of the instant treatment of possibility. reckoning via mechanical means,easing folks out of the necessity to think about What May Come, and also, possibly, relieving some of them of the possibilities of worry should the fortunes agree with their hopes.  And desires. Opposite, for the opposite. 

This thinking goes back a long way into dark and dusty time, though it becomes interesting (to me, anyway) when it gets wrapped up in Renaissance magic and science. 

I'm not sure what it reveals except for what people might have wanted to believe in during different periods of time.

Anyway, the patent drawings are pretty.

The ways of telling fortunes are broad and numerous and may have been dictated by the stuff that was readily available at hand; a veritable alphabet can be quickly summoned to deal with the most common of the sort:

Alectromancy (telling the future by relatively brainless modern dinosaur roosters pecking at the ground for stuff);

Astrology (thinking that the motions of stars that are light years away from the observer in a vast sea of space and their annotation on an infinitesimally small speck of universe dust called "Earth" can somehow interact with living organisms that are 10³⁰⁰⁰⁰ the amount of space that can be affected by the light from the stars that are 1/1,000,000,000 of the age of those stars);

 

Blank & Empty Things Series: Self-Referencing Languages and Babel

JF Ptak Science Books      Part of the History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things.

 

 

Returning to Jean-Jacques Scheuchzer's¹ magical, inventive, fact-bending naive-surreal work on universal history based on the Old Testament, I've found these two glorious and odd images of the Tower of Babel.  The first ("Genesis Cap.XI.v.4. Orthographia Turris.Mediummetalis") is terrific, shocking even in its abrupt construction and flat-out stumpiness, because it is one of a very small minority that shows the structure to be canonical, with a little church at top. The enormous stairway is just completely out of proportion to the purpose of the structure, the effort falling into some sort of odd advanced-child category.

If Italo Calvin's "Invisible Cities" or (better yet) Jorge Borges' "The Circular Ruins" were to be illustrated, this image would fit right in.

The other very unusual bit here, is that Scheuchzer also provides a plan for the city that was to be built around the tower--I'm pretty sure that I haven't seen references to this before, and the Biblical references to it are no help whatsoever in determining its physical aspects.

There are probably very few things that could be as blank or as empty as combative, competing, nonsensical and completely self-referential language or communication.  Well, except for Scheuchzer's very empty town plan locating the tower in an urban setting--a listless place of surrounded circles of nothingness for a place in which everything is said and nothing is understood.  Ground Zero for blank language.

 

 

Notes:

Two interesting books that I should mention that address the ideas of fantastic/imaginary architecture and decay are C. W. Thomsen, Visionary Architecture: From Babylon to Virtual Reality,   (Prestel, 1994) ; and  Paul Zucker, Fascination of Decay (Gregg  Press, 1968).

1.  Kupfer-Bibel, in welcher die Physica sacra, oder geheiligte Natur-Wissenschafft derer in heil. Schrifft vorkommenden naturlichen sachen, deutlich erklart und bewahrt, printed in Augsburg and  Ulm by  C.U. Wagner, 1731-1735. Offered in four volumes, illustrated with 758 plates, it is a magnificent work, if not altogether correct, or even near- correct, with an enormously confused pedigree, implying the wisdom and text of the Bible (and the old Testament at that) as the background for a physical history of the world.

 

Chess Pieces of Dusty Greats vs. Celebrity Mistakes: Robt Hooke vs. Paris Hilton

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1954

• QUESTON:  If great but not-popularly-known scientists could be represented as a chess piece, and that chess piece was on a game board opposite Popularly-Known-Celebrities-Not-Known-to-Scientists (and etc.), what piece would the great and dusty Robert Hooke be? And conversely, (on that opposite side), what piece would someone like, say Paris Hilton be?

See also earlier posts: The History of Dots Part 9: the Cell and Robert Hooke  and Horse Poop and the Stars: Robert Hooke, 1673 (No, it Wasn't Pegasus) and When a Compliment is Not: Newton and Hooke and the "Shoulders of Giants"

I wonder about poor old Robert Hooke.  He was such a tremendous thinker, a terrific rush of ideas, with revolutionary insights in many fields; he was a leading architect, a physicist, a microscopist, a chrononaut, a mathematician, an everything. He carried the Royal Society for years, carried on hundreds if not thousands of experiments, and of course was famously on the other side of a bad series of arguments with Isaac Newton.  At the end of his long life, Hooke was afraid of not being remembered, of not having enough money to see himself through hi sold age, afraid of others taking credit for his work.  He just seemed not to matter, anymore, in the last decade of his life (and a period in which he was still doing significant work), and I just wonder why he managed to become so semi-invisible.

He was so dedicated.  I have an image of him scurrying with a friend, removing the estimable library of a patron and donor to the Society, trundling the books in wheelbarrows across a mile and then-some of bumpy London streets finding a home for these great treasures.  He was an older man at this point, marching these books across parts of the city that he helped to restore after the fire, passed buildings that he helped to build and design, bumping his way through London, a great and famous scientist, saving books by the handful. [An idealized portrait of Hooke, at right.]

He was a tireless, relentless observer and experimenter, who lost little effort in a stranded idea and pursued interesting and problematic questions relentlessly.  More than others too he chased his won glory—minor but long and insistent—the years of which wore thin on many people in the scientific community.  But there were many characteristics of the man that made him not quite so lovable and endearing—not that Newton was any of those things, as he was not, but if you are going to be a secondary luminary to a super nova you’ve got to have something else going for you that the other man doesn’t have—sharing, helpful, greatly generous—to get you into the long pre-dusty pages of history. Also it would’ve helped if Hooke chose his battles with a little more aplomb and ingenuity—the war which began in 1672 with Newton went very badly for Hooke and followed him to the grave (and far beyond).

He just didn't "catch on", I think--at least he not for the long term.  His brain teemed with ideas, but perhaps by the last decade of his long life, his tireless brain still working on innumerable bits, he just sucked the air out of a room. 

He also never had his likeness recorded during his lifetime.  And that is saying a lot.  And I still don't know why.

Back to chess:  I figure Hooke to be a Knight.  I prefer Knights.  He moved like a Knight.  He importance was "higher" than that of a Knight, but, well, the Knight seems a good fit (and so he seems to get downgraded, in a way, even in this game).  And Paris Hilton?  I think she might be a queen (with a small "q")--as someone who is ultra-well-known but not for anything in particular except for the quality of being well-known. 

A Mystopian Alphabet of Newspeak Words: Orwell and Unthink

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1953

"It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words … what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take “good”, for instance. If you have a word like “good”, what need is there for a word like “bad”? “Ungood” will do just as well — better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not.’"--George Orwell, 1984

"Orwell and Nabokov wrote nothing like one another and did that to perfection."--Not H.L. Mencken

[David Octavius Hill (1802-1870) and Robert Adamson (1821-1848), St. Andrews [East Gable End of the Cathedral with Tower of St. Regulus], [1843-1847]. Calotype. Source: Princeton University Library.]

There is nothing that limits action than the control of the stuff that describes it:  words. Any dictatorship or totalitarian regime can appreciate this thought--many would try to eliminate even the thinking of this thought, let alone limiting the spoken parameters of discussing it. Removing the capacity to respond to what is happening in the world with other human beings by rephrasing the experience through the introduction of new words and the elimination of old ones is an excruciating form of absolute power that can be blatant as well as subtle, though I suspect that accomplishing this word control sotto voce would be the most effective/insidious method. 

[A page of Orwell's corrected Manuscript of 1984; source: GeorgeOrwellsNovels.com here]

George Orwell describes a terrifying society of just this sort in his book 1984 (with the complete text available here), which was an adventure into a Mystopia of the near-future (of about the year 2050).  He writes about a society, Oceania, that attempts to makes it members into one conforming biological unit for the sake of control it. One of the methods used to accomplish this is the destruction of words and the creation of other state-controlled words to replace them, a sort of single-channel television for the mind, a device using its own vocabulary which audially impregnates the listener with versions of correct thinking, redefining reality by controlling the ways of interpreting it.

This is a list of some of the words that Orwell's society creates--some of course do not stand well on there own, their deviousness appreciated in the context of the story, like the first example, "artsem", which through constancy has come to numbingly replace the idea of what the word represents.  Others, like 'good", are old words with a new meaning, making them new words with a bad (or  not-good) meaning. Or "free" of the old (or Oldspeak") meaning, where even the word "free" is used only to describe an absence, as in "this sentence describing the use of the word "free" is "free from the old meaning of free", like you'd want a baby to be free from germs.

See here for an autobiographical note on Orwell; "A Short History of My Life", by Orwell in 1945, here.

Airstrip One:  the new word for "England", which has been reduced to nothing but a terminal for  the society of 1984, Oceania, is composed of the Americas, part of southern Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

Artsem: Artificial insemination, which is the enforced and nearly the only method of reproduction allowed in the society, another brick in a structure that controls the expression of intimacy between people. Big Brother needs new people for the society to continue, but he doesn't want there to be any emotional connection between them outside of the prescribed feelings that people are supposed to emulate. Artsem further indoctrinates a no-contact policy between people. There was the possibility of sexual intercourse but only for the production of children when artsem was not applicable--this was called "goodsex", which was the opposite of "badsex", which was sexual relations for the joy of it. The orgasm was a hunted thing, to be tracked down and eradicated.

BB: Big Brother.  The major domo of Oceania, a hitler/g-d, an extreme presence of control.
"The story really began in the middle sixties, the period of the great purges in which the original leaders of the Revolution were wiped out once and for all. By 1970 none of them was left, except Big Brother himself. All the rest had by that time been exposed as traitors and counter- revolutionaries."

Bellyfeel: an unfeeling and enthusiastic acceptance of an idea, following without knowing or knowledge.

Blackwhite:  "… this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink."