Author: JF Ptak

The Towering Magnificence of the Porcupine

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

This is perhaps the greatest monument ever erected to the porcupine–of course it may be the only monument ever erected to the porcupine, but it is undeniably monumental. This unusual image was published in Strassburg in 1604 in Joseph Boillot’s (1546-1603) sumptuous New Termis Buch (first printed in 1592 as a Nouveaux pourtraits et figures de termes). It is a bestiary of sorts, a very curious book, offering real and imaginary animals together in alabastered, marblized, memorialized, architectural form, with the great hope of offering them to fellow engineers and builders for incorporation into the real world. Or perhaps not, perhaps it was all just done in fun, an exercise, an experience, an artistic creation wrapped inside the fundus of a great Baroque eyeball.

The end result is the Boillot produced some extraordinary beasts, wrapping them in extraordinary garments, surrounded by other wonderful animals real and not, and elevated to extraordinary heights. The powerful unicorn, draped with the vicious but subdued lion; the ass, regal, judicious, pensive, thoughtful, kept in place, or warm, by a dragon. Then of course there is the porcupine, absolutely magnificently appointed with spikes kept by by dogs, supported at all levels by the creatures.

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Architecture and Building
Internal Document Proposing an Organization to Establish Post-Nuclear Exchange Damage Assessment (1956)

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2885

I’ve written many times on the technical and political end of the creation and deployment of the atomic bomb, along with some posts on the use and manipulation of language in controlling the sense impressions of nuclear war and survivability. What I have found so extraordinary about this second part is the creation of ordinariness, or mechanization, or acceptance, of the aftermath of nuclear warfare–and what we’re talking about here is the
“exchange” of not just a few 20 kiloton Hiroshima-type weapons, but thousands of megatons of explosives and massive amounts of radiation. But this is the function of familiarity, I guess–given the situation it was essential to plan for eventualities A-Z, and for that you need structure, and vocabulary.

All things being equal, such things as an Terrestrial Afterlife in the United States needed to be contemplated because that is what we do–we make the situation possible for end-of-the-world stuff to happen, and so we have to plan for building things up again with radioactive detritus once all of the keys get turned and buttons pushed, as it is just a natural course of that historical river. That the bomb would be built was a given; that the Soviets would develop the a bomb and delivery capacities was just a matter of time, and that they would be our sworn death-enemies was also a fait accompli. To develop a way to somehow survive a nuclear war may have been a major deterrent to not launching an attack, especially when linked with a Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) arms build up (where everyone and everything would be obliterated if there was a nuclear war, or at least so by 1965 (and probably earlier than that). All this insane stuff may have worked, and somehow we managed not to ignite the world, because (to paraphrase Frank Zappa) there would be no real estate left.

On the other hand, building all of these weapon systems and planning for attack and the post attack world could have pushed us into a final confrontation, making all of this sound “winable”, “doable” somehow, that once the bombs had all exploded and nothing worked anymore, that there would be enough to pull together of our civilization to declare that we had indeed “won’”.

And the only way to declare a winner was to have something to stand on besides pieces of green glass and Earth, and so plans for communications and a military, police force, fire brigades, medical care, food distribution, banking, and all the rest–the pieces of a recognizable backbone of American society–would have to be undertaken. All of this could very well accomplish the creation of an illusion in the mind of the adversary that you are capable of surviving a nuclear war, and so there would be no great gain in attacking; or it could send the message that by doing this preparation that you were preparing a first strike scenario, and so the adversary would attack while the odds were still not horribly out of balance. And on and–it all looks like a lose-lose endgame to me, which is hardly a “game” at all when all players are losers.

But still there was a need to staff the thousands of positions that went into the theoretical end of figuring out the non-weapon-end world after nuclear war, and the above “position description” is an example of that, a necessarily pro forma form, just another job in a ea of jobs. This one’s job descriptions read like any other, except of course that the content was much different. Form the same, sentence structure the same, vocabulary basically invariable.

One aspect of this planning for the Afterlife was the planning part itself, planning to plan, how to make sense of the answers and the questions, a form into which the parts of a process are poured before they become the process itself.

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Atomic and Nuclear weapons — Naming Things
Albert Messiah in Berchtesgaden (1945)
JF Ptak Science Books Post 2881

I recently unboxed (after a long and deep in-box slumber) the classic two-volume work Quantum Mechanics by Albert Messiah. It was published in French in 1959 and soon found its way into English in 1961 (and 1962), and was a staple in the studies of two generations of physicists.

I had no idea of Messiah’s background, which is extraordinary. I learned that he was accept to the IAS (Princeton) with only a high school education—this was due to Messiah (1921-2013) having spent his formative years from 1940 to 1945 fighting and killing Nazis. He heard Petain on the radio announcing that the gentlemanly thing to do for much-fallen-France in 1940 was to lay down arms, which to Messiah was the clarion call to resistance. He also refers to Petain as an imbecile. He recalls Petain intoning a vainglorious “…entre soldats et dans l’honneur, il fallait cesser le combat, etc. etc.” , and that he does not recall this “stupidity” being much shared at the time (“…cette stupidité n’était pas tellement partagé à l’époque.”) This was indeed his path, as he joined the Resistance and fought for five years.

Here are a few interesting responses to questions put to Messiah at the Ecole Polytechnique in January 2009 regarding his time during WWII:

On a question of the lack of use of armor in 1940, Messiah says it simply was that French command sucked. (“Tout simplement parce que le commandement militaire français était un peu nul, c’est tout.”) Mediocrity was the ruler by which things were measured, and in general is very well spread. (“La médiocrité est une chose qui finalement est relativement répandue.”)

The people who won the war, and the reason why the Resistance was successful, were those who could think and stand out from the crowd. (“Parce que l’histoire justement est faite par les gens qui se démarquent de ça, des gens qui réfléchissent et qui éventuellement prennent des risques, c’est ce qui a donné la Résistance d’ailleurs, des gens qui prennent des risques mais qui ne vont pas dans le sens de l’histoire.”)

At the end of the interview Messiah relates being among the first to occupy Hitler’s residence/seat of government in Berchtesgaden in May, 1945. He found it very amusing and ironic that Hitler’s place would in the end by occupied by a Jew. (“…le malheureux Hitler a eu la malchance de voir son repaire occupé par un Juif.”)

And a Jew named “Messiah” at that.
- Read the full interview: https://web.archive.org/web/20110617204534/http://ddata.over-blog.com/xxxyyy/0/56/58/59/Texte-Messiah.pdf
- Obituary in Physics Today https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.4.2552/full/
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Physics — World War II
Subduing Insanity with Narcotized Sleep: Mental Illness Treatments in 1846

JF Ptak Science Books (Earlier post, expanded)

This book review on the use of narcotics to induce sleep in treating the insane appeared in the New York Journal of Medicine for 1846. The book, An Essay on the Use of Narcotics, and other remedial Agents calculated to produce Sleep in the Treatment of Insanity…., was written by Joseph Williams, M.D., and was published in London in 1845. The theory behind the sleep treatment was that the basic mechanism of insanity was “cerebral inflammation” or “excessive vascular action” in the brain—inducing deep sleep, evidently, was a good way to combat the over-active brain.

The article itself comes at an odd time in the history of the treatment of the insane. It came almost 40 years after the establishment of McLean Hospital (first known as the “Asylum for the Insane,” a division of the Massachusetts General Hospital), which opened on Oct. 1, 1818, and was the first hospital dedicated to the treatment of the insane in the U.S. It came 70 years after the great advances of Benjamin Rush, who elevated the “Mental Patient” from chains on the floor to the status of medical or nervous illness or disease. The use of narcotics over this period seems to have surged and waned. In 1879, in an article in the New York Times, the reputation of the Asylum for the Insane on Ward’s Island in NYC was considered—and one of the high points was that it had (largely) discontinued the use of narcotics. (There were still problems, of course, what with the asylum being overcrowded, housing 1100 in an institution meant to house 700, and where the chores and even nursing positions were staffed by the inmates, who were feed on 32 cents a day.) As late as 1921, though, Jacob Alter Goldberg notes in his Social Aspects of the Treatment of the Insane, that there was a new, sharp increase in “toxic narcotic” treatments of the insane. Of course, I guess one could replace “narcotic” with some sort of other misplaced treatment, like shock therapy, or Freudian mélanges, or something. Each age must necessarily have their entry in the encyclopedia of embarrassments

In this article we find sleep assaulted by the use of the following: purgatives (“to subdue vascular action when the propriety of bleeding is doubtful’), emetics, opium (to be used “in cases of high nervous excitability and in puerperal mania”), morphia (“the most valuable remedy for calming excitement”), hyosciamus (“to produce sleep, tranquilizing the irritability of the insane”). It is weird to see that the last sentence in the description of hyosciamus reads “some fatal cases have occurred from exhibiting henbane as an enema”.

A narcotic enema? Still to come in the review is conium (“I have used it frequently and in large doses…it is chiefly valuable as a deobstruent and alternative”, followed by camphor, Belladonna, hydrocyanic acid, colchirum, stramonium aconite, and others. “Warm baths’ makes an appearance (“90 degrees may be considered to be the best temperature for a warm bath for the insane”), as do cold baths, and the applications of ice caps.

I’m not so sure about what to make of it all, the sleep treatment of insanity I mean—after all, Joseph Lister only makes his epochal pronouncements on cleanliness in the operating theatre 15 or so years after this paper, which seems today to be the most rudimentary thing that one could do in treatment in the surgical room, so treating extra blood in the brain through drug-induced sleep doesn’t seem all that far away from the realm of possibility back there in early Victorian England.

I don’t think I’ll forget the toxic narcotic enema any time soon, though. Or the word “deobstruent”.

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Medicine, History of
Simple Sublimity: Images of Disappeared Common Objects. Traffic Lights from 1936.

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

These images are about as basic as it gets for the common, everyday, overlooked objects from the disappeared past. They come from the Course-Linds manufacturer’s catalog for traffic lights and other control systems called, yes, Traffic Signals and Controls, published in Syracuse (NY) in 1936. It is a beautifully designed catalog—excellent illustrations laid out perfectly on their pages, with all of the data you’d ever need to order these things for your municipality.

What I find so fascinating about the images here is that they depict ubiquitous objects that today would today—given their ephemeral nature—be exceptionally difficult to find.
Given this catalog, today they are not.

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Architecture and Building — Books–Great Cover Art
Front Line Field Medical Station, Italy, June 1918

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

This is another interest image from my WWI News Photo collection–a front line Italian medical/triage post on the Italian-Austrian front, June 1918. It is bare-knuckle bare, very rudimentary, though the soldier is receiving the attention of five medical personnel. What attracted my attention was the fifth medical aid, standing at the foot of the soldier, placing two calming hands on the soldier’s leg and foot, delivering calm and sympathy.

Western Newspaper Union Photo Service, Itaian Official Photograph

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Photography — World War I
A Sympathetic Pamphlet on the Plight of U.S. Japanese, 1944.

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2880

This pamphlet, 70,000 American Refugees, Made in U.S.A., by Truman B. Douglass¹, was a sympathetic appeal to the deeply grave situation legislated to 140,000 Americans. They were Americans of Japanese descent, many of them U.S. citizens, who by Executive Order 9066 were ordered to stand down from their lives for the sake of national security and be removed to distant and remote internment/concentration camps in May 1942, mostly for the duration of the war. There weren’t that many appeals for the primacy of the rights of these people at this time–the war for the United States was newly begun via the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor five months earlier–and the understanding was to protect the security of the country via the segregation and housing of what were seen to be the potential enemies in the existing Japanese-American population living on the U.S. west coast.

Franklin Roosevelt’s February 1942 Executive Order 9066 (issued 19 February 1942) to imprison more than 140,000 Americans (70,000 of whom were U.S. citizens, including children) for the duration of the war was the legal bombshell that gave the War Department the authority to authorize the removal of the Japanese to theoretically prevent those people from engaging in sub rosa and fifth column activities and wartime terrorists fighting for Imperial Japan.

Given that this pamphlet was in it third edition just a few months past its first appearance in October 1944 says that there was at least some interest in this political/moral anti-Executive Order 90662 position, though how much of that is from a popular groundswell of support it is not possible to say. (Also “edition” could mean “printing”, and the print run may have only been a few thousand at a time). That said I imagine that the print runs of this pamphlet were rather small given that there are only ten copies of all three editions in the collections of libraries worldwide. And since there are many collections that should have this pamphlet but don’t–copies are found in California State University Northridge, California State Irvine, Yale, Wisconsin Historical, Cornell, Berkeley, Davis, Huntington, according to WorldCat–and no copies seem to pop into the rare book market very often at all, I suspect that not many copies were printed per edition, which means that there was a repetitive demand for the pamphlet that exhausted small print runs, which means maybe there were 2000 copies printed…not exactly “groundswell” support for what was an unpopular position).

The story of the removal and control of the American Japanese population is complex and deep and has been addressed in many places in print and online (and even on this blog several times), and it is not my intent to address that issue in this post. I want to highlight what must have been a largely high-minority and mostly lonely voice of consideration and caution

Full text available via the California Digital Library.

Notes:
1. The printing and publication information for the pamphlet: “The Citizens Committee for Resettlement, 6501 Wydown Blvd., St. Louis 5, Missouri, 25 cents. May also be ordered separately at cost indicated. Reduced price in quantities. Community Preparation for Resettlement of Japanese Americans, published by The Committee on Resettlement of Japanese Americans, The Federal Council of Churches”.

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Social History — World War II
A Report from Warsaw including News of Treblinka, Auschwitz, and Majdanek, 1944 (Reproduced in Full)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

I decided to share the entire Ploish Labour Fights for Freedom, Equality, Independence because it is pretty scarce and its content is very powerful and deserves to be read. It is only 12 pages long but there is a lot in there. The pamphlet was printed in London by Liberty Publishers in 1944, though I cannot tell if it is before/during/after the Warsaw Uprising. There photo on the front cover (“Graves of Warsaw’s defenders in one of the public squares…”) may reference those killed in the Uprising, so it may well be printed in August at the beginning of the battle, as there is no direct reference to it in the text. By the end of the Uprising there were 10,000 of these defenders who would be killed as well as 200,000 people living in the city.

Of particular note here are the four pages devoted to the Nazi/German treatment of children. There are also specific references to the deathcamps/KL Treblinka, Majdanek, and Oswiecim (Auschwitz).

(There is an impressive lineage for libraries holding this title as found in WorldCat. Of the 12 copies located worldwide, only three are in the US (NYPL, Harvard, Notre Dame); the others are found in England (University College, LSE, British Library), Israel (Yivo and National Library), France (Bib Nationale, Paris), Poland (Nardowa and Dukat), and the IISG (Amsterdam).)

This is an ocr of the original—all bold appeared in the original.

CHILDREN ARE DYING

“It is not surprising, therefore, if among the Polish children, who lack food, clothing and warmth in the winter, and who lead the most wretched existence, epidemics…”

CHILDREN IN PRISONS AND CONCENTRATION CAMPS

“The Polish children are not even spared the grimmest forms of persecution. They share with the adults the sufferings which the Germans are visiting upon the Polish nation. They crowd the prisons and die at the hands of executioners, together with the adults.”

“Between 11th and 28th November, 1942, for example, a large number of women, together with 60 children, were brought into the Pawiak prison in Warsaw. Children from 12 years of age and upwards are being sent to the notorious camp at Oswiecim. Children under 12 sent to Oswiecim are not admitted to the barracks. They are killed on the spot.”

“From the very beginning of the occupation the Germans have made it clear that, even when dealing with children, they will not hesitate to employ the severest measures. Immediately after the September campaign in Poland the Germans murdered, in Bydgoszcz, nearly one hundred Polish boy scouts, who faced the firing squad singing the Polish national anthem. In application of the principle of collective responsibility, when many Poles perished in mass executions for deeds they never committed, children died with their parents, either shot or burned alive.”

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Social History — World War II
Extra-Earths Redux (and Turbines in Space!) 1955
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

“Extra-Earths” is a very modest category on this blog with only five posts–they do not take up much space in the bulk of the 2,780 full posts and 2,400 “quick posts”. The subject rarely comes up, and no wonder! How many times do you see an image of Earth from Earth–and why would this be happening? Obviously the Earths that I am interested in pop into existence in the science fiction/comics/Outsider Logic worlds. There are some who use “extra Earths” as a unit of measure, as in “the global resources consumed would be the equivalent of an extra Earth’s production” or some such thing–those don’t work for me here, as I am just interested in the visuals of the extra of two Earths.

For example, in an earlier post, “The Battle of the Extra Earths: Mini-Extra-Earth Vs. Full-Sized-Standard-Earth (?)”, there is a full-on frontal assault by an Earth-mini, or some such thing (I have not read the story because, frankly, there is only just so much time to burn on these things and I was just interested in the artwork.)

Today’s example is more-or-less an Extra-Earth and it is close enough for me: this one appears in the September 1955 issue of Scientific American and is a big full page ad for Remington Rand’s UNIVAC. This computer was only about five years old or so at this point and Remington Rand was selling it for computing complex engineering bits, as with that screaming turbine. I assume that the turbine–which is inoperable in outer space of course–is coming from that Earth of the black seas, or something, and that by a very long stretch the UNIVAC has to be somewhere so I guess it could be another Earth. Yes, this really doesn’t fit, but it is close enough for me. (Also the business-end of the UNIVAC is not what looks like a monitor facing the machine’s main component-it is the longish podium-lookng piece opposite that “monitor”, which would be the “supervisory control panel”.

I’m told by our son Feliks that there is a “Counter Earth” in the Marvel universe, where there is an “Extra Earth” on the other side of the Sun, neither Earth ever in line of sight to one another…that seems to be another category of its own, too: things that exist but are invisible because they are on the other side of something, like the bizarro story of Nazis escaping to the far side of the Moon. But that’s another story.
- To see the other Extra-Earth posts, just enter the term in the site’s Google search box.
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Contraries — Strange Things in the Sky
Munitions Train, France, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

This is a New Photo Service image by Underwood & Underwood of a laboring narrow gauge train making its way along to the front with two cars full of munition and men, on its way to U.S. batteries at the front in France, 1918.

(The original wasn’t robust enough to pull much detail in the faces of the troops in the railway car doorway…I also couldn’t tell what they were standing on…)

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Photography — World War I