A Daily History of Holes, Dots, Lines, Science, History, Math, Physics, Art, the Unintentional Absurd, Architecture, Maps, Data Visualization, Blank and Missing Things, and so on. |1.6 million words, 7500 images, 4.9 million hits| Press & appearances in The Times, Le Figaro, Mensa, The Economist, The Guardian, Discovery News, Slate, Le Monde, Sci American Blogs, Le Pont, and many other places… 5000+ total posts since 2008.
Contact johnfptak at gmail dot com
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post History of the Future series
There’s an awful lot in this nihilistic-pro-socialism revolutionary Sci-fi tale of invasion and Armageddon and deliverance from mega-capitalists than I will make room for here, where “here” is an 1893 tales depicting 1903–I really just wanted to point out the pretty pictures of flying machines. (For a full summary follow the link above to a Wiki article on the book; also do follow the link for a short biography of the author.)
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
In my experience antiquarian images of trees damaged and destroyed and torn up (and “enormously devastated”) by tornadoes are very uncommon things–ditto maps of the paths of tornadoes. (I found this image via a very interesting but seemingly unnamed blogsite, located here, dedicated to early images of waterspouts and tornadoes.) They are found in Gottlob Burchard Genzmer (1711-1771), Umständliche und zuverläßge Beschreibung des Orcans welcher den 29. Jun. 1764 einen Strich von etlichen Meilen im Stargardischen Kreise des Herzogthums Mecklenburg gewaltig verwüstet hat, published by Friedrich Nicolai, in Berlin (and Stettin), in 1765. [Full text]
In any event, I have not much to say on these images save for the fact that I find them to be extraordinary, and wanted to share.
JF Ptak Science Books Post 2144
The Annalen der Physik, begun in 1799 and still going strong, is one of the foremost scientific periodicals ever published. Over the years the debut of revolutionary and significant ideas have made their first appearances in the journal–Gauss, Clausius, von Helmholtz, Doppler, and many many others, perhaps most famously by the four spectacular papers in Einstein’s annus mirablis of 1905. The Annalen also famously re-published significant contributions by foreign scientists, their work seen in German for the first time in these pages. For many without French or English or Italian, it was the first time many German scientists read of Daguerre, Dalton, Cavendish, Volta, and so on–which was a big deal. [See this link for a collection of useful user’s guides to the Annalen that are published elsewhere on this site.]
JF Ptak Science Books Post 2143
Nothing quite says “bizarro” like the bizarre1–and there has been plenty of that on this blog. There have been a number of places that I have identified as Bizarro Worlds, but so far it seems that the only self-proclaimed Bizarro World is this one, from the Superman2 comic book–a place that was the opposite of the Superman-y traits that made Superman Superman. Somehow to equate bizarreness on this world everything appeared as geometrical shapes with basically no sphere or rounded edges. (How Braque or Picasso and company would have reacted to this is unclear.)
It is evident that Bizarro World inhabits a place in the universe that allows for bizarre things to happen, a sort of bizarrograviation, that also allows for shadow to be cast in space without regard to light source.
It is a lovely to addition–if only by this brief note, to a continuing series on Extra-Earths. This is an Earth, and it is Extra, hence: Extra Earth. Some of the other Extra-Earth posts include:
—Extra-Earth Humano-Alien Souls From Outer Space Repopulate Earth-Hell!!(??),
—Mondo Bizarro, Science Afflictions and the Dubious Mind—Bad Science, Part 1. NYC in Space (?!)
—The Battle of the Extra Earths: Mini-Extra-Earth Vs. Full-Sized-Standard-Earth (?)
and some others, all quite findable on this blog via the Google search at left.
I’ve just noticed that these Extra-Earth posts share something else that few of the other 2500+ posts on this site do not: extra exclamation points!
And to end, I should point out that this is not the first time I’ve encountered a square Earth, bizarro or not:
Notes
2. “Superman” in the OED:
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
I’ve been posting on some unusual words this month, first in the UN- words found in Joyce’s Ulysses, then another set of UN-s from Webster’s dictionary of 1828. There were very many pleasant surprises in those lists, though most of what I was taking away as good clean entertainment really wasn’t the original intention, for the most part (especially so far as Mr. Webster is concerned). Today’s entry in the Kingdom of Words is a lovely creation in German, something I found (for myself) today in a paper by the physicist Wilhelm Weber, printed in 1861.
The word is Maasssysteme, the only word I think I’ve ever come across with three S’s in a row, and those following two A’s in succession. It seems as though there is a dim memory for examples of aass in Dutch, and maybe also in English, but I can’t pull them out of the memory right now. For now, we’ll just enjoy Maasssysteme.
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
Interesting bits of unintentional art–in some of these cases, unintentional, or found, Dadaist art–can be found in unexpected places. Here, in this parade of zeros, we find such a case, and the place it is taken is from Girolamo Maggi’s book on fortification , printed in Venice in 1583. Aside from the crowded images like the Maturation of Zeros, I like the Embigenment of Empty Space approaches as much.
[Source]
These are beautiful images, in spite of their deadly origin.
JF Ptak Science Books Post 2141 Part of the History of Memory series
These are some fine and early printed examples of uploading information, though it had nothing ot do of course with electromagnetic anything back in 1523. The “Cloud” in question was the mind/brain, and the images helped to serve as placemarkers in how large amounts of memory were kept in the head, the methods available to just about anyone with a keen enough facility for organization and understanding, and the ability to develop learning mechanisms that would help to store and sort memory and info.
In another way, though, the process of memory was associated with the Cloud–this second attribution of the early Cloud, though–at least according to St Augustine–was God. Plato (Meno) thought along the lines of the soul learning nothing new, and that what learning was all about was recalling of the data that came to us before we were born. Augustine–mostly in Book X of the Confessions–had a different idea (and much more complex and elaborated than I could do justice here in a few sentences) about unconscious knowledge and memory, which was where, I think, he thought knowing God might be. This memory (the “divine quality” in Cicero’s thought) was the storehouse of expressions in the belief that the knowledge of true things was unconscious, and that in understanding memory this knowledge becomes evident, and that at the base of it all is the knowledge of God. It is as I said much more complicated (and elegant) than this, but I think that the root of it is correct, at least so far as memory is concerned.
In any event, here are some of the visual clues for creating alpabetic memory palaces as found in the short (30 leaves) 1523 work by Gulielmus Leporeus, Ars Memorativa (and available from the Bayerische Staatsbibliotek, here)
JF Ptak Science Books Post 2140 Part of the series on the History of Blank, Empty, and Missing Things.
When modern art was becoming modern, and artists were reveiling more of nature and life by using less of its components and using more of suggestion and motion and color–leaving out the “detail”–where indeed did that detail, well, go?
It is interesting to imagine a composite world to our’s, a place where that missing and removed detail goes. For example, when JMW Turner painted a train passing over a river on a bridge, he was more suggestive of the scene than he was in reality-based descriptors. [Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway, 1844.] The intricacies of realism and reproductional relativity is not there, the action and train and river implied, artistic impressions and whatever else was in the artist’s toolbox or mind’s eye.
Perhaps the seeping detail from one world to the next is more like the sphere entering the two-dimensional world of Flatland, or better yet the reverse of Charles Bragdon’s 1drawings of the footprints of 3-D objects passing through a 2-D plane…the detail of the Turner seeping through the canvas and into the opposing DetailWorld, falling like rain. Maybe it is a world of non-representational images and impressions awaiting the attention and arrival of detail to give it all a solid, easily distinguishable representation of the imagined world around the easel in that Other Place.
Another beautiful image by Bragdon is from “Personalities: Tracings of the Individual (Cube) in a Plane” from Man, the Square2 shows the “shadows” of the three-dimensional figures as they lived in their two-dimensional world. It comes close to the impact of the cubes above, but really only depicts what two-dimensional creatures would see of the three-dimensional beings inhabiting their Bragdonesque world. 
All of this was put into my mind by seeing this image (The Goldfinch, 16540 by Carel Fabricius. Clearly we can see a bird on a perch, chained to the upper rung, with another rung below, but as much as we can see the detail we don’t. So much of this image is suggested and implied, hundreds of yers before Impressionism: the face of the bird is barely there, the second rung dissolves into the wall, the shadows are muted and half-existent, and so on. The details of the painting are as much missing as they are there.
And of course the world of detail would disappear more and more, until by 1911, it existed hardly at all, the representational world drifting off the canvas completely, for those who wanted that to be the case.
Again, as much as say Kasimir Malevich made all of the detail go away in his Suprematist paintings like a white square on a white square (White on White, 1917/18, which I can say is not served well at all with images online or in books, as the artwork is really pretty textured and detailed),
at about the same time ither artists like Marcel Duchamp were both taking away details of one sort while adding new details of another never-yet-done sort, as in his Nude Descending (1912), where we begin to see the representation of the fourth dimension in art:
Perhaps the rain of details into DetailWorld work in reverse for the unexpected details of stuff we can’t see in our world?
Well. We know that there is no DetailWorld, but I think it is certainly interesting enough to think of these revolutionary changes in art and trying to imagine the enormous amount of painterly stuff that the innovations/discoveries replaced, if they were to all go to one place. In a way it is analogous to the changes in the mountain that I can see now from my living room window–mostly it is invisible when the patch of woods between our house and the mountain is all leafed out (seeing the forest for the trees), but with autumn and winter here at about the same time, it is easier to appreciate both the trees that I can see when I can’t, and the mountain that I can’t see sometimes when I can.
Notes:
1.(Bragdon) A PRIMER OF HIGHER SPACE. (The Fourth Dimension). Rochester: Manas Press, 1913. 8vo, (12), 79pp, including 30 plates.
2. (Bragdon) MAN THE SQUARE. A Higher Space Parable. Rochester: Manas Press, 1912. 12mo, 34pp, 9 illustrations.
JF Ptak Science Books 
In a continuing series on the History of Dots I’d like to add the following, disconnected though they are, so I don’t lose them in the coming mix. It is also one of my few chances to actually need to use the word “scrofula”–a lonely, ugly word, a word as unpretty as “Susquehanna” is pretty, a word that should be as timid, but isn’t, a word that really exercises all parts of your mouth when you say it out loud. (Try it–there’s like five or six movements involved in getting that past your lips.)
To be truthful about it, it isn’t so much about scrofula as it is about the “curing ” of the disease with special little pills: the Popular Pill! This woodcut appears in a short sales treatise, published in London in 1675 or so, by Humphrey Nendick, (the delightfully titled) A Compendium of the Operations Vertues and Use of Dr. Nendicks Applauded Pill, against all Chronick Diseases,m curing by the cleansing of the blood, That most successful medicine, which is so deservedly called, the Popular Pill. For its Spcial vertues, safety and success, against the Dangerous and our Nations Popular Disease, the Scurvy. I’m not so sure about what
Dr. Nendick was up to with the pill, but I do know that is was obtainable from grocers, bakers, cutlers, gunsmiths and barbers all over England at three shillings for forty tiny dots of possible joy. Its imaginary Galenical powers were supposed to bear against the tedium and insolence of all manners of scurvies and popular complaints–much like its contemporary dot/pill rivals like Pilulae Anti-Scurbuticae (sold at the Carv’d Posts in Stonecutter Street between Shoe Lane and Fleet Ditch (!)).
Albrecht Durer doesn’t seem to have many dots at all in his works, though I did stumble upon this image from Sebastan Brant’s Navis Stultifera (Basle, 1497)–a fool interrupting a mother and daughter who were “discussing” their game of backgammon.
On the other hand the history of the construction of the periodic table is necessarily filled with dots, as we see with the monarchical creation of John Dalton (1766-1844), in his New System of Chemical Philosophy (part II), and which was printed in 1810–these symbols were sued to visually represent the atomic structure of compounds, and were of vast importance and predictive powers, marking the true modernizing of chemistry. It was in Part I of this work that Dalton first applied atomic theory to chemistry.
This last element for this installment on dots simplifies things enormously, sort of, even though these dots represent the very building blocks of almost everything else. They represent counting. And they are beautifully present in this image from Franz Brauner’s Rechenbuch fuer osterreichische Volksschulen (published in 1953). Funny that this “Rechenbuch” turns up again here in 1953–its been the major part of titles of books describing the laws of arithmetic for 450 years.
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post Part of the series on World War I
This wonderful, contemplative, lonely, sad, and ultimately draining photograph depicts a camouflaged road somewhere on the Western Front. That’s rather a prosaic term for that atrocious line of battle that stretched from the North Sea to Switzerland, where hundreds/thousands of miles of trenches were dug and filled and fought over, where millions of shells were shot and exploded, and millions of soldiers and civilians killed and wounded.
The “Western Front” really doesn’t quite do as a descriptor.
But here we are, just the same. And so the image above, with the man on a bicycle on a well-used road–he’s moving along under a long canopy of netting designed to obscure/hide the road from telescopic viewing or eyes-in-the-sky. When this photo was made for the Western Newspaper Union, mid-1918, the war was nearly over. But still there was the fighting, and the supply lines for the millions of troops, right to the bitter end at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.
And the full version:
The photograph itself is one from a collection of hundreds here from news photo service agencies, images made of the War from a pool of photographers who covered the action for American newspapers and magazines, and whose work was necessarily censored. The photographs would be selected/ordered by a news agency, and the caption of explanation would be provided by the news photo service (as seen above).