Author: JF Ptak

A Mile-High Pile of Wood–Graphical Display of Quantitative Data.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 913

Continuing
a long, developing thread on the graphical display of quantitative data–and
especially that which uses man-made objects for comparison—is this interesting
bit from a Romanian mining publication from 1933.

The
huge mound next to the Eiffel Tower shows the consumption of wood in Romania over a
ten year period, a stack of wood 700 metres long and 1500 metres high. Evidently this wall has only the most rudimentary depth of a metre, as the legend reads that the volume of the woodpile is 1,050,000 metres cubed, which is the same as its square area. So somebody missed something, here, though the artist did supply some nice shadowing.

Just
above it appeared this comparison for the amount of oil consumed over the same
ten year period

I’m
not sure why this comparison was being made.
This does come in the interwar period which saw a great expansion in
Romanian territory and a vast modernization effort following the country’s devastating
experience in WWI. Maybe it was illustrating modernization from wood-burning power/heating sources to oil-based. I really don’t know–I just liked the Eiffel Tower being dwarfed by a massively tall and impossibly skinny woodpile.

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When a Compliment is Not: Newton and Hooke and the “Shoulders of Giants”

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 912

I
was tooling looking for vision quotes and came upon this by Samuel Taylor
Coleridge (an unusual stomping ground for me) from The Friend (published in 1828):

“The dwarf sees farther
than the giant, when he has the giant’s shoulder to mount on.“

This
made me think of the over-quoted sentiment quoted again by Isaac Newton

“What Descartes did was a good step. You have added
much several ways, and especially in taking the colours of thin plates into
philosophical consideration. If I have seen a little further it is by standing
on the shoulders of Giants.“

Newton wrote this in a
letter (5 February 1676) to the immensely creative workhorse Robert Hooke1. 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).
Newton and Hooke had many disputes—most notably
in optics—basically because Hooke pursed Newton
(among many others) for expropriating his ideas. Hooke was over the line on this and probably
pushed the point too far—Newton
was enormously annoyed by this and other Hooke contacts and wasted no effort in
trying to pay Hooke back the favor over the years. Newton
was famously sharp and could fashion that intelligence and wit into a terrifically
nasty tool against those who bothered him.

And
so back to the “shoulders” letter. This always struck me as a bit too
melodramatic for a Newton,
and also a little too congratulatory for a field that he basically owned,
especially since he was a towering egoist (and not without cause). But he did pay Descatres (“des Cartes” in the
original) a compliment; though I could not at all think of Newton referring to the dreaded Hooke as one
of the giants’ shoulders he was standing upon.
Newton’s
reference to “giants” might also have been a swipe at Hooke’s physical stature,
which was terribly slight, small and crooked.
SO I think that Newton
was referring to Descartes, and decidedly not Hooke.

So
this semi-ubiquitous scientific laudatory quote is perhaps not quite so. Kinda like the very well known painting by
William Blake featuring Newton
as a naked geometer, figuring out the world, a color-tone praise of the great
physicist. Or perhaps not. Blake I think simply didn’t like Newton, didn’t
care for the scientist taking away the mystery of the world that Blake loved so
much—especially in regards to color, which Blake needed to stay interpretative
and mysterious. Newton took part of that away, and I think
Blake exercised a little payback in his artwork.

It
seems to me that if one looked at the “shoulder” quote and the Blake artwork as
works that were insults and not praises, they can be easily seen that way. Its all a matter of perspective.

Notes

1.
The 28-year old Hooke published the results in a gorgeous and revolutionary
book, Micrographia (a lovely e-text edition appears at Gutenberg, here)
in 1665, which became an instant best seller and highly praised and valued.
(Samuel Pepys, perhaps among the shiniest stars whose imprimatur was like a
royal blessing, said the book (was) “the most ingenious book that I ever
read in my life.”) There is no telling what the people of the mid-17^th
century thought of seeing such incredible discoveries in the little
semi-invisible stuff that made up their normal, daily lives. The only
thing that somewhat equates to this would be if the first images of the Hubble
were those of Earth-bound objects whose detail had previously been
unknown. Hooke’s observations and drawings of things like the common flea
were just an astonishment—that such a creature of “low order” could have such
intricate detail and design was a complete revelation. The drawings of
the fly’s eye, too, was an inescapable wonder, an incredible object to consider
as having any detail pre-microscope, and then revealed to have
unimaginable design and elegance.

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Perspective
Missing Pieces of Women: Pope Joan & the Proper Popular Girl of “The Ladies’ Home Journal”

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 910

Listening
to these dreadful stories this morning on NPR about the Vatican’s relations
with the Roman Jewish community and the abortive WWII papacy of Pope Pius XII—the
papacy of blank and missing compassion—I thought about the missing Papacy of
Pope Joan. Whether or not she existed is
a question of debate; whether she was a pope or not is perhaps even less
debatable. What seems not impossible
though is the ability of a large institution like the Catholic Church to make
the entire issue of unwanted history or legacy to go away.

The
historicity of this papacy is long and shows the murkiness of the earliest
writers on Joan. She was supposed to have served as pope between Leo IV and
Benedict III around the year 850. The
fuller versions of her history turn up in the 14^th century, although
the earliest mentions of a female bishop of Rome go back to the 9^th
century—Joan remains unnamed though until the 13^th century when
Martin of Opava’s Chronicon Pontificum et Imperatorum¹(referring to
Joan as “John Anglicus” or “John of Mainz”) does so for the first time.

Joan
escapes the Middle Ages with a little flair, but doesn’t do so well in the
Renaissance. As a Missing Piece in the
history of the Papacy she turns up not-so-well represented: for example, she is seen here looking good
but turning up bad overall as the Whore of Babylon². She was treated as a disgrace, and impostor,
someone who demeaned the Catholic institution by her sex and deception, though
god knows that the history of the papacy is filled with horror stories³ that
far exceed the reach of mere deception.

So
I was thinking about the piecing-together of the Pope Joan jigsaw and
remembered an actual “womanly” jigsaw that could actually be pieced
together. This bit came together as a
result of a post I did here just two days ago (What Goes Into Making Human Robot Girls, 1941), and was one of a series of
intolerably heavy eight-page pamphlets cementing the structure of female social
intercourse at the hands of the magazine The
Ladies’ Home Journal.

One of these
publications—hardly a pamphlet per se, just a folded 11×8 inch sheet of heavy
stock—came without a title, presenting itself as a puzzle. The puzzle pieces
are parts of two women, “Miss Popular” and “Miss Unpopular”: the reader was to
take the publication, cut out the pieces, and reassemble them into hidden role
models, with phrases describing each on the back of each puzzle piece, all done
without the slightest possible understanding of metaphor or irony.

Miss
Popular phrases/descriptors: live wire, plenty of push, wide awake, snappy
looker, dependable, genuine, secret keeper, on-her-toes, spick and span, light
hearted, all-around-student, straight-shooter, gossip scorner, sympathetic,
cheerer-upper, sparkler.

Miss
Unpopular’s phrases/descriptors: glory grabber, sour puss, cheater, sob-sister,
snooty-snob, wet-blanket, borrower, prissy prig, sharp tongue, gory gossiper,
clothes dummy, iceberg, sly and slippery, jellyfish, sticky-sweet, soft soaper
(?) and of course fast and loose.

And
so girls—or young women—picking up this publication in 1941 were expected to
cut this thing up and piece together the proper (paper) role model using the
reinforcing traits of meager acceptance printed on the back of the puzzle
piece. And poor Pope Joan, whether she was real or not, whether she was
imagined or sunk purposefully away into the Pandora’s sisters’ boxes of forced
forgetfulness—it really doesn’t matter—is just another woman or part of woman’s
puzzle whose blank or missing piece has been extruded, forced into a form more
friendly to a world less friendly to women.

Notes

1.According
to the Chronicon: “John Anglicus,
born at Mainz,
was Pope for two years, seven months and four days, and died in Rome, after which there
was a vacancy in
the Papacy of one month…” [See continued reading section below for more]

2.
Babylon was the
representation of the seat of evil on the Earth. From the “Book of Revelation” (17:3–4):
“And I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast, full of names of blasphemy
with seven heads and ten horns. The woman was garbed in purple and scarlet, and
gilded with gold, gems, and pearls, and bearing a golden goblet in her hand
full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication.”

3.
Borgia and the Medicis not being the least of the story: see E.R. Chamberlin’s The Bad Popes, (1969)

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History of Holes 12: Caves in mid-Renaissance Art

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 909

“When [the soul] is firmly fixed on the domain where
truth and reality shine resplendent it apprehends and knows them and appears to
possess reason, but when it inclines to that region which is mingled with
darkness, the world of becoming and
passing away, it opines only and its edge is blunted, and it shifts its
opinions hither and thither, and again seems as if it lacked reason.” Plato, The Republic book. VI, 508d

Plato
dipped deep into the myth/metaphor/parable/analogy/allegory of the cave,
contrasting it with the allegory of the sun, discussing the pursuit of
knowledge real and not-so.

I
like the idea of the half-displayed, semi-schematic, fade-away disposition of
the cave and how painters dealt with them and their hidden contents in early Renaissance
art.

Its
difficult to show a cave, a dark hole (occurring in all rock types and
topographic situations, btw) that really hadn’t been dealt with scientifically
yet—even if humans had been using them one way or another for thousands of
years.

I’ve
noticed these images time in and time out, and I’ve not really saved them, or
at least I haven’t segregated the odd etched or engraved images, though they
are all here somewhere, so I can add to this post from time to time. The image that I’ll use tonight comes from
Harvard’s Fogg Museum and is the work of the Master of
Osservanza (Sienese school, fl 1430-1450, manuscript illustrator). It is a popular image, “Christ in Limbo”,
though of the others working in this genre we see Christ generally at the
entrance to a tomb/cave-like place, standing just outside of the doorway (as with Mantegna, Durer, Pacher, Fra Angelico and others). The Master of Osservanza gives us an
exquisite cutaway view of the cave of limbo, showing both the outside and the
inside, which is an uncommon and beautiful perspective.

I should add that the tearingly odd “Saint
Anthony Abbot Tempted by a Heap of Gold”, also painted by the Master of Osservanza (ca. 1435) depicts the least-likely-of-all-saints-to-be-tempted-by-gold reacting in horror to, well, nothing. Nothing at all. We see him reacting to what used to be there, but which for some reason was removed, painted-over at some dim point in the dusty past, for reasons that I do not know. (And so the painting could easily move into my Blank and Empty Things series.) But the desert landscape is so sparse and the sky so surreal with bent clouds that it is easy today to overlook the gold entirely.

[I know there’s SO much more to this business with the caves–I just wanted to get this post started before it all went down the thought-hole.]

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What Goes into Making Human Robot Girls, 1941

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 907

[See the follow-up post “First Thing to Do is to Find Some Men”; How to Get a Boy-date, 1941]

An
old friend of mine, Dr. Sam Koslov, was brilliant, accomplished and polymathic, with
great senses of wonder, inquisitiveness and humor. He spent many years in research and as a
long-time editor at Johns Hopkins APL. He was a delightful and serious man, though
one of the projects he worked on sounded much more like squeaky scifi than pure
sci. That was Project Pandora, and science fiction it definitely wasn’t—it was
an attempt at a form of control over human behavior via low level microwave radiation¹.

This
came to mind as I was leading through some very low level, high impact behavior
control exhibited in a series of social engineering pamphlets published by the Ladies’ Home Journal in the early 1940’s. It is heartbreaking, really, to think of people
like my mother reading these things and being inundated by cultural architecture
that left little to the imagination. It
seems so terrifically outrageous in 2010; and of course it makes me wonder
about what things that seem so de rigueur
today will be the Ladies’ Home
Embarrassments of 2050 .

Granted, nobody’s corneas were being shaken loose via this method, but the effect of the sentiments of control in these pamphlets still seem eye-poppingly
strangulating. I’ve included only a few
examples here, but there are at least a hundred others to choose from.

Perhaps
it was the Date-Rate pamphlet that caused most of my teeth to fall out—it is
sheer and painful, offering virtually nothing to the young women reading it and
practicing its morality play but gender obedience and servility.

“Did you give
him all your attention?” “Did he run things?” “Did you give him a chance to
impress you?” “Could you make him laugh?”
It isn’t until the final rating question (#25) that we get to something that
opened the possibility of a two-way interest in the relationship, but only
barely: “Did you find you liked the same things?” Its sad, really.

When I read some of this to my 17-year-old
daughter, she just looked at me with an open mouth and eyebrow furrows: it was simply beyond listening to, for her,
and certainly not anywhere near worthy of a response.

Of course this is just the tip of the tip of the tippity tip of the iceberg on the control of social thought and the keeping of the male-dominated social order, and its only one part of a very wide spectrum of overall codifications, much of which seem pretty much left to history within two generations.

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Found Absurdist Art: 1950’s Mommy Rockets, Flannel Moon Suits & Underwater Firefighters

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 907

I like Found Art categories: Found Absurdist, Found Surrealist, Found Cubist. This is a vision of art or design produced for something specifically not absurd or surreal or cubist, but once removed from their intended environment and definers, become the thing that was beyond their specified reach. The following examples are all from the mid-1950’s, their sources reprinted below:

And this Spongebob-like existence under water, where you can have beaches and surf and fire and etc. at the bottom of the sea:

And of course the mom at the modern electric range feeling the birth of some sort of deep outer space astronautical space travel outer space rocket (though with no visible viewing windows which leads me to believe that perhaps no Outer Space Astronauts were on board):

The image sources:

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Future, History of the — History of the Future
Big Planes: Aircraft with Dining Rooms in Their Wings

JF Ptak Science Books Post 906

Is it just me, or do the rest of you see Cary Grant at a teeny-tiny table when looking at this aircraft? There’s just something so horribly wonderful about the excesses washing over the passengers of high privilege in this airplane.[Source: The Illustrated London News 21 Dec 1929.]

And the airplane has a name—Christmas, named for the man who provided its inspiration, Dr. William Whitney Christmas¹–and was a paper plan to produce the world’s largest airplane.

It would’ve been so by leaps and bounds. The Christmas was to have a 262’ wingspan and a gross weight of 142,000 pounds at the time when one of the largest planes aloft—the Patrician Keystone K-78—had a wingspan of 86’ and carried 18 passenger, 2 pilots and an engineer. It also held the world’s record for hauling the heaviest payload, which for some reason was “33 girls”. It was bigger still than the largest thing in the air, Lufthansa’s Dornier DO.X –this was an aircraft capable of moving 60-100 passengers (serviced by a crew of 10-14), a flying boat with 12 (Curtiss Conqueror 610hp) engines on wing sections 157’ long. (Was this a mile-a-minute fuel consumer?) The Dornier plane didn’t last long in service due to operating costs (1929 was a bad year to undertake an expense like this, especially in the hyperinflated Germany) and was in an aviation museum by 1934². (This plane—one of three constructed—was destroyed in a RAF bombing raid in 1943.)

Here’s something extraordinary about the Christmas: it had a dining room (actually, a “dining saloon”) that took up 15% of the plane’s floor plan. There was also the spacious smoking room, the crew and officer quarters, the machinist’s shop, engine room balconies (?), and of course the staterooms that seem to run along most of the front of the plane. The side elevation shows not very much space at all allotted to what must’ve been some massive engines, seeing as how there’s only two four-blade props. (The small lateral cross section shows two people against the plane for scale—these folks must’ve been giants; I figure they should be a little more than 75% of the manikins. I make each prop blade to be about 10 foot (?))

As it turns out this aircraft looks a lot like Edmund Rumpler’s³ (1872-1940) giant. Outfitted with a long row of staterooms along the front edge of the large wing and a huge dining room, it doesn’t seem to be equipped with an area for the engines. Maybe this was an endemic flaw among older fast-thinkers…

Notes:

1. Dr. Christmas (1865-1960) was the third American to fly and was the first to design a plane with aerilons.

2. Compare this to the Antev An-225, a modern very-,limited-production monster that could haul 1.3 million pounds of cargo, and the 747 (hauling up to 900,000 pounds) and the mammoth Airbus A380—all relatively the same size but with fabulous design and power.

3.Rumpler made very significant aeronautical contributions to the German effort in WWI, as well as designed the first aerodynamic auto—his military planes though during the war were great triumph, partially because they were also Germany’s first mass-production-possible aircraft. This didn’t help him much when Hitler came to power—being Jewish, Rumpler was arrested, and then released by Goering who at least could find a small part of himself to save this one Jew who served Germany so well.

4. Source for the Rumpler image is the wonderful ModernMechanix site here.

Interesting comparison chart for big planes: [Source]

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The Oldest Image of a Flying Pig? An Adynaton Antiquarian Illustration, 1687.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 905

How
old is the saying, or rejoinder, “…when
pigs fly”? I dunno, and frankly it
doesn’t really matter. Except for right now, when I found this rather
extraordinary image of a pig-in-the-sky from 1687. It isn’t a flying pig, but I’m not sure what
it is: the origin of the image is from
J.de Dalence, Traite de l’Aiman (publihsed in Amsterdam in 1687), a book about the history
of magnetism. But nothing else matters,
just the flying, atmos-floating pig, right there in the sky, perfect against a
puffy cloud.

I
suspect—without any intention of doing any research on my suspicion—that this
may very well be the earliest depigtion of a flying pig. And it just so happens to have appeared in
the same year of Newton’s great Principigia.

And
just for the record, I wonder how often anyone sees an image 300+ or more years
old of any of the other great adynations? For example, “It is
easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle,
than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” from the Book of Matthew, 19:24, just doesn’t seem to lend itself to empirical description, as it would
pretty much lessen and defeat the purpose of the literary description.

The flying pig, though, may be a horse of a different
color, so to speak.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Bad Ideas — Blank and Empty Things; A History of
Advanced Utopian Martian Communities, 1911

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 904

This futuro-Utopian homage to
ET-civilizations and space travel was written just too early to have been
sucked up by period-appropriate Hollywood
script raptors. Reading it is a little
out of the question and left to the domain of sci-fi archaeologists; the book
is stuffy and dry and very stiff
(brittle !) without being terribly interesting and doesn’t stop for the right
word when four will do. (See below for an example of the writing.) The ideas though lurking beneath the surface
though are pretty good for its time, though they are hardly the great undertow
that rips you away and out of the clutches of the stuff that make this a pretty
object rather than a book.

To Mars via the Moon, an
Astronomical Story. written by Mark Wicks
and published in 1911, left the Moon quite behind in its literary assault on a
super-advanced civilization that the space travelers find on the red
planet. Wicks owes a big nod (and gives
it) to the astronomer and faded theorist Percival Lowell and his Mars as
an Abode of Life (1908)1. Wicks’ Mars is enormously advanced
techno-superpower filled with telepaths and mega intelligence, as well as a
reincarnated version of his own dead son.

Okay, enough. I’m really just stopping here because of the noble
outsider-like Martian city/landscape, a circular city with canal2-like
connectors. It’s a busy environment, with the perspective-challenged city
looking vaguely bathed in a holy halo, car-like objects skimming along the
canal-roads, and “pre-flying saucers” in the air. It is lovely in its own way—certainly the
publishers thought so, as they incorporated the design right on the spine of
the book.

Notes

1.Lowell’s
hypothesis was rounding criticized by many, including Alfred Russell Wallace’s Is
Mars Habitable?.

2. Giovanni Schiaparelli reported these features
first, in 1877, referring to them as canali in his native Italian, which means something more
like naturally-occurring grooves or channel; English-speakers like Lowell
stopped just short with the word, lopping of the final “I” and going with
“canals”, with its overt implications of
intelligent design. And thus are
religions born.

The entire book can be found on the
Gutenberg site: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2763/27633-8.txt

The sample of the writer’s ware is below, the final two paragraphs of the book: the penultimate paragraph being one long run-on sentence including four embedded exclamation points, and the final two sentences of the final graph ending in an exclamation point and a dot dot dot question mark:

“Yes, we are doing well–there is no doubt about that; but,
notwithstanding my present very satisfactory circumstances and the certainty of a brilliant future if I stay here, ideas have long and persistently been running in my mind that it would be far better for me to go back to Mars, and–by Jove! strange indeed that I never thought of it before!–perhaps those very persistent ideas are actually the outcome of Martian influences!!”

“The wonderful music I heard upon Mars still rings in my ears; and, at times, so thrilling and peculiar is its effect upon me, that I feel as though I were being almost irresistibly impelled to return to that planet. Well, I should very much like to see the dear old Professor and Merna again, and also my many Martian friends. Then there’s Siloni, whom I can never forget, for mentally her image is ever before me. What a nice girl she was! If I were to return to Mars, I wonder whether…?”

First edition spine source: http://www.sumnerandstillman.com/Catalog/sumner.cgi/9691

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Ocean-Crossing Floating Airports Across the Atlantic, 1935

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 903

This short
shelf-lived idea was that of Edward R. Armstrong (1880-1955), who in 1927 first published his plan for a series of 1200’x200’
floating platforms for refueling and whatnot for transcontinental flights. These five-acre stations—named the “Langley” in honor of
Samuel Pierpont Langley¹— would be placed every 375 miles across the ocean. It doesn’t look like a very practical (or
good) idea, but Armstrong received a $750,000 piece of development change from du
Pont and GM, which was major dollars in 1929.

Armstrong’s
idea would get major play in the popular press from time-to-time, his project
renamed “The Seadrome” and discussed as a series of floating islands. Armstrong himself would organize the Seadrome
Ocean Dock Corp. in the late 1930’s, his pretty but enormously impractical idea
(reported by Time Magazine² in 1933 as little more than “a perennial gift to Sunday feature
editors”) finally grinding to a salty end with greater
fuel capacity and efficiency in transatlantic aircraft.

An even worse idea appeared in the pages of Science and Mechanics in 1936:

Notes:

1. A Time
Magazine article
published 28 October 1929 [a day before the market crashed!] about the
Langley oddly states
that Langley was the “designer of the plane which, except for accidents, might
have flown before the Wrights’ plane did in 1903”. Tough potatoes. What the magazine didn’t
state was that Langley, who was the president of the Smithsonian Institution at
the time with access to major money and benefactors simply went about the flight
problem incorrectly, and produced an airplane (or “aerodrome”, as he called it)
that did not and would not fly. Not flying because of accidents means, well,
not flying. The Wrights’ approach to
problem solving was elegant and beat Langley
by miles. Langley deserves credit for his other (many)
achievements, but not for this aircraft.

This same
article only references Armstrong as a “swarthy engineer”.

The article
is reprinted below.

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