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 Point, and many other places... 5000+ total posts since 2008.. Contact johnfptak at gmail dot com
The central image in the opening salvo in Thomas Bowles' Geography Epitomiz'd. Of The Stars And Planets. Of The Sun And Moon. Of the Air and Meteors. The Terms of Geography Explain'd (1733) reminds me a great deal of later visionary and outsider works. It is a beautiful way to display and solidify vast chunks of data into a cohesive (and pretty and appealing) whole, an interesting structure that calms the dynamics of divergent information. It's a lovely piece of design and imagination. [Source: New York Public Libraries Digital Collections]
"How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics."--mnemonic device by James Jeans on remembering pi to 15 places, where each word length assoicates a number in pi. Arndt, Jörg; Haenel, Christoph (2006). Pi Unleashed. Springer-Verlag, pp 44-5.
There are simpler ways of remembering something than developing an odd mnemonic for remembering pi, especially when the memory device will get you only 30 places or so...and so it hardly feels worth the effort to remember some posie and then write it down to perform a pi-matic numerical translation. This is especially so when you consider that the man recognized as being the world record holder but not so (Akira Haraguchi) committed the fist 100,000 places of pi and took nearly a day to recite it--megaefforts like this make the smaller accomplishments of remembering pi to 100 places seem fairly insignificant.
Some of the people set to remembering pi (piphilologists) use methods similar to this as memory devices, including an entire book of 10,000 words constructed in just this way--many more, I think, use a memory palace/method of loci method, locating numbers and identifying sub-patterns and placing them in connecting "departments" in the brain. (The Big Book on memory devices is by Frances Yates, The Art of Memory, University of Chicago Press, 1966; also Jonathan Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, Viking Penguin, 1984.)
I'm not sure what the need is for remembering the number to so many places when it seems as though the first seven digits will be sufficient for most (when "most" = "just about everything") things.
On remembering pi, from Nature, volume 72, p 558, 1905:
The molecular chemistry of dots of 1947 is a beautiful thing, worthy of a powers-of-ten episode, though I can only do a gigantically scaled down version of it (a powers-of-two maybe) given pixelation and its dot-defeating and necessary tendency to relieve roundness and introduce squares everywhere.
Well, there's busy and then there's busy. Somehow Dickens and Shakespeare managed to produce dozens of superb works--enough for one great work by dozens of other writers--all in a surprisingly short period of time, like 25 concerted years each, before they gave in to the immortal anti-beloved of eternity. John Ruskin--writer and art historian and critic--wrote a lot of books in his long life, and generally worked on many other things at the same time, all by hand, all hand-written, all stored in wooden files, all data fetched directly from books that he owned or had to make his way to.
I bring up Ruskin because of the letter I found that he wrote to Charles Eliot Norton outlining his activities. It is an impressive list (pp 180-181):
This is emphatically not a robot-type contraption, not by a long shot--it just happens (if you look at it in a certain way) to look like one. The automatic man was still a bit away, though Steam People and the like had certainly made appearances decades before this one.
The toys--Crandall's Acrobats, patented in 1867--came in boxes, a number of "acrobats" per box, as seen in the following post from Tracy's Toys blog:
It has been quite a while since my last contribution to this series, and I'm sorry that this addition is such a quick one--it is, however, unexpected and lovely.
The engraving, "Monument of Nicholas Gaynesford and his Wives in Carshalton1 Church" was published in Lyson's The Environs of London, 1796 (though this may be reprinted just a bit later), and depicts the very large monument to Gaynesford (1471-1548). What is particularly remarkable for me is the incredible stipple work that forms the background. On first glance the background treatment seems to be solid, but there is something else there that gives it a depth and causes the collection of stark white figures to seemingly float on the page. This is the cause:
This detail is about 20 square millimeters from the original and is just absolutely filled with small dots. A closer look reveals even more:
There's a few hundred thousand of these marks in the image, which measures only about 35 square inches.
We saw it, and prepared for it, the Impossible Thing, the oncoming of megakilll, or what Henry Adams called The Distinguished Thing, acknowledged and prepared and built ourselves a reserve of anti-fear for it.
Once the Soviets demonstrated their capacity to field and then deliver an atomic weapon in August 1949, the great race to Armageddon was underway, a zero-sum game of nuclear dimensions, where an canonical victor is mostly that in name once the million-megaton war was fought and over.
The best that could be done so far as the general American population was concerned was to stockpile foods, recognize the sounds and sights of an attack, pay attention to the EBS, and possibly prepare for teh worst by digging a fallout shelter, or hide under your wooden desk at school, or wear an atom bomb suit, or build an atom bomb house. Of course if you lived in the 100+ metro areas that were deemed targetable you could also plan your escape route; however, since hundreds of thousands
(and more) other drivers would be thinking the same thing, getting out of town might not be a possibility. (This was true even if you paid to one of the government-issue nuclear attack evac maps and stayed to the even/east odd/west as dictated by your car's tags, there would still be an impossible mess.)
The Atom Bomb House, by Robert C. Scull and Jacques Martini, was designed and published in 1946, and for all intents and purposes supposed that the house and furnishing and all inside it would be safe from an atomic attack. The blast walls around the house's perimeter are a curious touch, and actually look pretty nice--I don't know how much they would deflect the effects of an atomic bomb, though. Still, it was a way around thinking about the impossible.
Making the next logical leap, I guess, the architect Paul Laszlo presented Atomville in 1954, which was a collection of dwellings and structures that were bomb-survival as part of a design-survivable community.
And of course there was some thinking about making each person their own Atomville, with atomic bomb suits (which I wrote about earlier on this blog, here):
So for 15 or 20 years of getting ready for the Soviets to attack Americans were probably desensitized to what that attack actually meant--after hundreds or thousands of warnings and exposure to the possibility of war and nuclear holocaust, many people grew immune to what it all actually meant, swirling away in the mists of Mutually Assured Destruction like a bad song that you know by heart because you've heard it on the radio fifty times.
Then there were those like Ed Teller who thought to spend the equivalent of many multiples of trillions of dollars in the hopes of spreading the country out so that there was an equal distribution of people and factories and such, making the U.S. impossible to attack because there were no centers of population and industry, meaning that the USSR would have to attack everything, everywhere. This would have involved building 20 million new homes and all of the infrastructure that goes along with that, as well as moving all business andf relocating all of the means of production in the United States. That was a towering idea that towered low, but it did represent another line of thinking on survivability that moved from the Atom Bomb House to Atomville to the seeming opposite of those, to AtomExUrbia. (See here for the fuller story.)
So preparing for the worst, preparing for the thing that you really couldn't prepare for, became an object of desire.
It was as though people could not see the forest for the trees--which is quite ionic, because one piece of nuclear weapon test films that is no doubt very familiar to most anyone over 40 depicts a "forest" being blown apart by a blast. The "forest" was actually a stand of trees constructed in the Nevada desert to see what would happen to flammable trees in a nuclear conflagration. ("...The U.S. Forest Service brought 145 ponderosa pines from a nearby canyon
and cemented them into holes lined up in tidy rows in an area called
Frenchman Flat, 6,500 feet from ground zero. Then the Department of
Defense air-dropped a 27-kiloton bomb that exploded 2,423 feet above the
model forest..." on May 8, 1953.1) Not surprisingly, they were mostly destroyed, even using a tactical nuclear weapon. I guess that the issue was not if they would be destroyed but how destroyed they would be. Still, looking at a forest and looking at a nuclear weapons test would leave little doubt that the forest would be pretty-well destroyed--it's just the distance that the destruction would reach would be open to question.
Notes
1. Check here for the atomic bomb test on the artifical forest in the Nevada desert (an article by Ann Finkbeiner in Slate).
This is a very special effort on behalf of logic and the law, and may have been the first effort to codify the idea of the law in symbolic logic. It appeared in the journal Nature on 24 April 1913, and I think in spite of it being interesting and even pretty, it just doesn't work for me. But I'm reproducing the article (a long one for Nature) because it is really such an audacious thing, and a terrific idea, if not a good one.
At some point I think I would like to post an exhibition of some of the collection of the vastly/quietly weird/surreal/Outsidery titles from my BizzaroLand Today! pamphlet collection. Sometimes the titles are just incredibly weird, or wrong, or they're not titles at all but something else, or they're unintentionally absurdist of dadaist or Surreal, or they are just Outside what we might come to expect in the world of logic and its extensions. Sometimes the titles are just odd and the work is real; sometimes not. Sometimes they're just terrifically understated or heartbreakingly simple, and even useful, like this example (from Clymer, New York, 1945):
The central image in the opening salvo in Thomas Bowles' Geography Epitomiz'd. Of The Stars And Planets. Of The Sun And Moon. Of the Air and Meteors. The Terms of Geography Explain'd (1733) reminds me a great deal of later visionary and outsider works. It is a beautiful way to display and solidify vast chunks of data into a cohesive (and pretty and appealing) whole, an interesting structure that calms the dynamics of divergent information. It's a lovely piece of design and imagination.
![[5]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Somerset_01.jpg#cite_note-5){kind=link}