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.
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JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
[Geological map of the U.S. from the 1870 U.S. Statistical Atlas, here.]
Even though I have used (and owned) these atlases over a long time I’ve never collected them together in any of the 2600+ entries (2036 longer posts and 500+ Quick Posts) that I have made to this blog. So today I include links for the atlases in their entirety, as found on the sumptuous site of the Library of Congress. The books are interesting, fascinating, captivating, and beautiful.
JF Ptak Science Books Post 2038
Part of a Paper Micrscope series, Zoomology
Michael Beschloss posted this remarkable photograph of the Lower East Side on Mulberry Street, a rare color photo made around 1900. There is a lot of life going on here–people posing for the photographer (standing on an elevated platform with a large view camera, no telling who or what he was imaging), people caught in their daily lives, people. Under the Paper Microscope the image reveals all sorts of sub-images, photos-within-photos, making it a fascinating exercise in exploration.
For example, the two men hiked-up on the back of a moving wagon on the bottom-right seem to be enjoying themselves in expectation, the man on the left about to toss something underhanded, the guy on the right in a bow tie getting ready with a smile to enjoy what was going to happen. To their right: a man with a sales platform draped from his neck, watching a girl rush by, his pocket stuffed with paper.
And the full mage:
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
Washing machines no doubt have been called many things, and they have been named after many great concepts and desires–but I think in the history of naming household appliances, the popular washer produced by Thomas Bradford & Co Laundry Engineers (High Holbron, London and Cathedral Steps, Manchester) in the last part of the 19th century may have had the oddest of them all. It was the Vowel A–the “Vowel” being the washer and the “A” being the model. But, still–that was the name of the machine, and it has a definite flavor of the Absurdist to it. 
Which is a detail in:
[Source: Una Roberston, The Illustrated History of the Housewife, 1650-1950, St. Martin’s Press, 1999, pp 86-87.]
There was also the Vowel Large E and the Vowel Y–the “A” seems the best of the lot though, for simplicity and symmetry.
These washers were evidently great aids in the kitchen delights department, and provided for no disappointment.
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I’ve posted a variety below of the important papers of Murray Gell-Mann (b. 1929, his bio via Nobel.org is here) as they appear in Murray Gell-Mann, Selected Papers, and published by World Scientific in 2010. Each has a link to the original paper. [Source: Google Books]
Following this is a re-post of the full list of publications by Gell-Mann as presented on the website of the Santa Fe Institute. All I’ve done here is copy the somewhat-difficult-to-read text into a table to differentiate the entries and make it a friendlier document (for me, at least). Again, this is solely the work of those at the Santa Fe Insitute.
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JF Ptak Science Books Post 2036
It was a curious thing to find, these engraved images of Egyptian dance and movement, seeming for all the world like motion shorthand, a sort of antiquarian Labanotation or kinetography. They appear in the stray atlas volume here by Juste Adrien Lenoir de La Fage (1801-1862), Histoire Generale de la Musique et de la Danse, which was published in Paris in 1844. I imagine that this is a surprise mostly to me–the Egyptians certainly knew that tey danced, and from the looks of it, they danced with athleticism.
[Text can be found at the Haiti trust.]
Most of the surprise part of this–the opening the book and having a sense of the “aha!” and deja vue— were these images’ association in my head with the work of the motion picture pioneer and all-around smart guy, Etienne Marey, who in the 1870’s created what was essentially the
world’s first “slow motion” device. One iteration of Marey’s apparatus
was basically a long series of ganged cameras recording a motion for a 
simple task at a given time frame and presented on a continuous strip
of photographic paper, sort of like a motion picture with the camera
speed set at three frames per second. The resulting images were
phenomenal and showed people for the first time the exactness of all
manners of simple motions–motions that no longer looked so “simple”
once all of its aspects could be studied from captured photographic
evidence. Even the act of hopping over a small stool or bending to pick
up a bucket of water were enormously revealing in a way like Robert
Hooke’s Micrographia displayed the great detail and complexity
of the seemingly simple fly. Perhaps the most famous of Marey’s series
of images was that of a galloping horse, which also for the first time
revealed what exactly the horse’s legs were doing and proving that
almost every painter in the history of art represented the galloping
horse incorrectly. His series of photographs (as in the samples above and below)
show a fairly close fit to the work of the futurists (like for example
Duchamp) who would come into being after another four decades.
But the la Fage comes earlier still–granted, they are engravings, and they don’t necessarily all show a progression of movement, though some of them do–but it makes them very interesting in a capturing-the-moment way like few people had done before.
La Fage, 1844:
Etienne Marey, ca. 1875:
.
And Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending (1912):
JF Ptak Science Books
This
interesting and somewhat futuro-paleo 1944 pamphlet combines two modern interests in one package: Green’s Ready-Built Homes Present the Solar Home
presented both a prefabricated, well-designed house that was also passive solar
friendly. The former is a long-established architectural state of achievement; the later, not so–at least on a popular, let’s-have-everyone-own-one level. The architect and engineer was
George Fred Keck (1895-1980) , a true modernist, and designer of one of
the twelve “Homes of the Future” for the Chicago “Century of Progress” World’s Fair in 1933–this effort (which is also the copyright deposit copy) was published in 1944.
Soalr panels such as we have known them over the last few decades were not available back in 1944. The “solar home” that he offered here used seasonal variations and house
location to regulate heating/cooling, glazing and siding, air movement, and the
storage of thermal energy in building materials—mostly, there were lots and
lots of transfer-friend
ly double-paned windows, all of which were
forward-thinking ideas for 1944. In
addition the house was prefabricated, making construction easier, simpler, and
quicker than any of the stick-built houses being constructed at that time. There was also an impetus for quick, good
construction given the housing shortage caused by the returning WWII veterans.
The prefab idea was also a relatively new one in architecture—though there are
instances of bits and pieces of prefab architecture reaching back hundreds of
years, the first earnest attempts at providing such housing on a mass scale
dates only to the 1920’s. In any event, the double-effort here was a fairly early effort at combining these two ideas–and certainly something that seems to have been about 60 years too early.
JF Ptak Science Books Reference Tool Series
I found recently a very interesting and useful table of the top-100 cited papers published in the Reviews of Modern Physics (published to 1988, see pp 10-12). It was collected and generated by Dr. Eugene Garfield and for me displays some pretty valuable information. It is arranged alphabetically by author, and since it is in a pretty static format I generated from the converted pdf file an index showing the papers arranged by the number of citations together with the last name of the author and the placement in the RMP–unfortunately the quality of the original pdf was such that it restricted using the title of the paper because it would have resulted in re-entering all of the data. So to use this new table just refer to the original pdf and you’ll be able to quickly find all of the rest of the bibliographic information.
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
“Exceptionally Large Trestle Fill” is the rather Engineeringly Prosaic header for this Popular Mechanics article from March 1912. The 4,869′ span was at Sprague Gulch, “near Lamont, Washington” for the Spokane, Portland & Seattle RR, stood 101′ above the water (at its highest), and the idea was to backfill a foundation for stability–a project that was found to be cheaper than building a steel structure.
The trestle was built in 1907 and the backfill begun in 1911–a project that would ultimately move and deposit 2.35 million cubic yards of earth. The process called for the construction of two temporary trestles at levels approaching the permanent track–the last bit of fill would take place from finished level. This is just a beautiful project.
JF Ptak Science Books Post 2035
Nothing exceeds like excess, and the excessful is not often successful. Victor Lougheed saw this in the first decade of powered heavier-than-air flight in a homey and sensible article in Popular Mechanics in 1912. He had a nice touch in trying to reign-in the impossible stuff that was happening in imagining flight, saying “it is safe to give to fancy only when fact is far away”–and that imagination is perfectly fine, but now that “human flight is a thing accomplished” that the issue of future aircraft should be one of engineering. Thinking big is fine just so long as you have those tools in the box.
Lougheed offers the above illustration as an example of big-and-bad thinking, though he unfortunately does not credit the thinker or the artist. Too bad–it would have made a nice follow-up. That said, as a casual reader in early flight I have rarely seen someone taking on what are clear excesses of expectation–Lougheed is an interesting exception.
He does go on to give an example of possibly-flyable future aircraft and presents the remarkable New Antoinette–a fantastic and prescient design for a plane only nine years removed from the Wrights’ flight, a streamlined monoplane that seems to come from reasonable future, which it sort-of does. This plane evidently was too heavy for the 100-h.p.engine, but the engineering was at least definitely “there”.
The Antoinette:
Here’s a very long and very illustrated thumbnail site for French pre-WWI aircraft: http://flyingmachines.ru/Site2/Arts/Art4743.htm
![[Godfrey Kneller’s 1689 portrait of Isaac Newton]](http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/n/newton/isaac/portrait.jpg){kind=link}