Author: JF Ptak

Naming Things: a Note on the Winds

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

Its curious how there were so many names for something that was invisible though its effects were instantly understood, compared to not naming something so visible but whose effects were not as well understood as the former. I’m talking about the wind and clouds. Winds and clouds I should say–it is so easy to write in terms of the singular with wind whereas one would never do so with clouds.

Also the visual vocabulary for depicting winds that aren’t directly associated with a cloud (say, a tornado) are extremely difficult to depict unless you are showing direction and severity. Another obvious exception would be depicting the mythological wind gods, of which there are many and in some cases the wind gods are paired with thunder gods (as with numerous Asian examples, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wind_deities#Aztec_mythology for a quick list). And its not like winds are easily represented as wind in art, though again it seems to me that for early works prior to say 1700 its feels to me like Chinese/Korean/Japanese artists are more interested in the subject than others. When I try to imagine the wind and to some degree its effects in art I come up with Andrew Wyeth’s blown curtains, a windy (?) van Gogh “Starry Night”, the great wave of Hokusai, Turner’s Rain/Steam/Speed, and Homer’s nautical scenes (and the nautical genre in general). It is a different story for books with “Wind” in the title–there are no doubt hundreds (Gone with, Name of the, Shadow of the, Reap the, Paint the, Before the, Written on the, and so on). Perhaps the wind is a little bit like the quark of art, in that it is a confined environment but it is observable, and measurable…which I guess makes it nothing like the quark, except that it is “difficult”.

In any event, following up on post from a while ago on the names of the winds ( https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2012/04/chasing-the-squamish-the-fremantle-doctor-and-naming-the-wind.html) I wanted to share this great display of information, Jan Jansson’s volvelle/chart of the 32 winds from the fifth volume of his monumental Atlas Major, which was published in 1650. (Jansson, “Tabula Anemographica seu Pyxis Nautica Ventorum nomina sex linguis repræsentans”. Amsterdam, c.1690. Image via Bibliodyssey .)

A monumental, three-dimensional form of wind identification exists in Greece, a marble Roman clocktower (an horologion) with a wind vane at the top, along with eight symbols of the associated gods of the winds (the Anemoi) that the vane depicts: Boreas (N), Kaikias (NE), Eurus (SE), Apeliotes (E), Notus (S), Livas (SW), Zephyrus (W), and Skiron (NW).

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A Note on an Often-Cited Quote of Vincent van Gogh
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
- Also see: Found Poetry in the Words in Last Lines from Vincent van Gogh, 1889-1890 https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2014/03/the-words-in-last-lines-from-vincent-van-gogh-1889-1890.html#more
[Source: Google Maps. This image captured on a virtual walking Google tour of Auvers. This is the view exactly behind the van Gogh brothers’ graves, on the other side of the cemetery wall, looking away. See: “There are no Van Goghs in Arles (?)” https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2014/12/there-are-no-van-goghs-in-arles.html]

So there’s a van Gogh quote is making the rounds on social media, and to me it sounds not quite right, like some of the odd Einstein and Newton “quotes” that are never attributed or annotated or properly referenced and just don’t exist in the history of the person. I can find a lot of sites using this quote but after looking at a bunch of them no one provides a source reference—some reference another site that simply is carrying the quote though they don’t give a source, either.

Anyway, the quote: “I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process”. I’m not a van Gogh scholar, and I’m not even an historian of art. The only bit of van Gogh experience that I have is that I have read all of the published letter in his archive, as well as some incidental reading–this a scholar does not make, though it does give at least a little background to ask a half-decent question.

After checking many of the places using this quote and finding no reference to its origin I went to one of the great van Gogh resources: his correspondence. There are about 903 surviving letters, with ca. 820 written by van Gogh and the balance being letters he received. The great majority of them (about 650) were Vincent writing to his brother, Theo. When I searched the letters for a simple reference of “heart”, “soul”, and “work” I was surprised to find that there were over 800 hits. When I narrowed the search a little, searching for “heart and soul”, the results were drastically changed–there were only 8 hits, none of which were a fit for the elusive quote. There following were among the eight, and to me could be read as quite the opposite of the meanings of the searched-for quote:

“What helped me recover my balance more than anything else was reading practical books on physical and moral diseases. I got a deeper insight into my own heart and also into that of others. Gradually I began to love my fellow men again, myself included, and more and more my heart and soul – which for a time had been withered, blighted and stricken through all kinds of great misery – revived.”–12 November, 1881, to Theo.

And:

“I also don’t think that it would be a hindrance if my health let me down on occasion. As far as I can make out, it isn’t the worst painters who can’t work for a week or a fortnight now and then. Sometimes the reason for this is that they’re the very ones who ‘put their heart and soul into it’, as Millet says. That doesn’t matter, and in my view one shouldn’t spare oneself when it comes to the point. One may be exhausted for a while, but one recovers, and the advantage is that one has gathered in one’s studies, just like the farmer does his corn or hay.”–Letter 257 (14 August 1882, to Theo)

And:

“You will understand my intention better than Pa if I were to try to explain such a thing to him. In my view I’m often very rich, not in money, but rich (although not every day exactly) because I’ve found my work — have something which I live for heart and soul and which gives inspiration and meaning to life.”

“My mood varies, of course, but nonetheless I have a certain average serenity. I have a certain faith in art, a certain trust that it’s a powerful current that drives a person — although he has to cooperate — to a haven, and in any case I consider it such a great happiness if a person has found his work that I don’t count myself among the unfortunate.”

“I have a certain average serenity”!–Letter 327 (11 March 1883, to Theo)

There were no hits in the van Gogh letter archives for the phrases “lost my mind” or “heart and my soul into my work”. It certainly seems as though that the source of the quote is not in the correspondence.

If you know the source for the much-quoted quote, I’d be very keen to know of it.

Notes:

Sources for the van Gogh letters:
- http://www.webexhibits.org/vangogh/
- http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters.html (Van Gogh Museum)
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Art History
A Note on Becoming Distracted (Mass-energy Equivalence, Missing Continents, 19th C Martian Communication, and Levels)

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2768

Here’s one of those languid, curling, endless river bends research stories that takes you totally away from where you wanted/needed to go. After a chat with my friend Eric that involved conspiratorial otherworlders I had the idea of checking out some other other-minded folks who I would normally never consult for some possible angle I might have missed in a long-simmering research topic. I’ve been looking in bits and pieces for the first publication of the world’s most famous equation, E=mc^2: as it turns out this is not a trivial question. I’m not talking about the idea of mass-energy equivalence, but the appearance of equation that everyone on the planet knows. The first derivation that appeared in Einstein’s 1905 paper would not be recognizable as such by a general reader, nor would many of the others. The first appearance of E=mc^2 under Einstein’s name after some considerable digging is in 1946 (!), in the inaugural issue of Science Illustrated; withina few months the equation appeared in the upper level of an atomic bomb mushroom cloud on the cover of Time magazine…but that all is another and more complicated story.

Anyway my idea was to look at some anti-Einstein-relativity books to see what I might be missing, and in a short time I found a reference to the equation and Gustave Le Bon in a 1914 issue of the Comptes Rendus. Luckily I have that run, and so I checked out the paper–it did not contain the equation, of course, though it did have some references to him claiming to have had the idea of mass-energy equivalence in a series of papers published in Revue Scientifique (Rose) int eh early 1900s to 1905. I decided to check these out to because, with luck again, I have these down in the studio.

Le Bon is an interesting/odd guy, who may or may not have been the great polymath he played in his script in life, though he was formidable enough to be considered for the Nobel Prize in 1903. So I worked from 1888 forward in the Revue (called “Rose” because the wrappers each weekly came in were rose colored) and bumped into Le Bon quite a bit. The man was interested in everything, and traveled to those ends to meet his curiosity. In one paper in 1892 he wrote on the origins of the arts of India (as he also happened to be a pioneer anthropologist), and I saw that the article proceeding it was in an area I was working in for a customer relating to the planet Mars. (This was by Norman Lockyer, editor of Nature, who wrote on Mars and it canals, canali, the “canals” part of their interpretation mightily disapproved-of by the old gent.) The Lockyer referenced something in I was actually looking for, an article by Henri Jules Perrotin (in the same journal but in 1888) who wrote of his observations of the planet, happily reporting that he did find the at-that-time-evasive canals, but also noted the disappearance of a Martian continent under what he suspected might be periodic “flooding”. Anyway on the return to the Lockyer I went too far and with great satisfaction found the following drawing:

That was quite a wide turn–anti-Einstein, where the hell is E=mc^2?, Gustave Le Bon’s 1905 A-bomb, Lockyer’s review of how to communicate with Martians, Perrotin’s disappearing continents–to get to this lovely drawing, no? It was almost worth it! This lovely thing (and oh to be able to render this in 3-D!) appeared in an article on a new application of photography to the surveying art/craft, M. Laussedat’s “Historique de l’Application de la Photographie au Lever des Plans”, November 5 1892. Its an interesting article, and two of the illustrations for are excellent pieces of art, in and out of context:

I know that was a long way to drag the reader to share two drawings, but I needed to get rid of the story…

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History of Holes — History of Nothing
RedOdd and RedEven–a Small Collage of Some Unusual Red Pamphlet Covers

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

“He is too picked, to spruce, too affected, to od as it were.”–Shakespeare Love’s Labour’s Lost (1598) v. i. 13

I just threw this together, pulling in some of the red-based pamphlet cover designs from different odd areas here–there are many many more, but this again is a selection of odd and red: OddRed, RedOdd. Or if not odd, the at least red and even, EvenRed, RedEven.

“OddRed” isn’t a color, it just designates that red is being used in relation to something odd, which is very different from nouns or adjectives that get thrown in front of “red”, as in “blood-”, “brick-”, “flame-”, and so on, which are actual colors. OddRed is just an idea. As is EvenRed.

The OED finds “red” to be as old as OE, and defines it so: “Designating the colour of blood, a ruby, a ripe tomato, etc., and appearing in various shades at the longer-wavelength end of the visible spectrum, next to orange and opposite to violet; of or having this colour.”

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Social History
Rolling Thunder: a 12,000-Pound London-to-Birmingham Steam-Driven Land Coach (1833)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post [And yes! Four hyphens in the title!]

Here’s a found bit from the Journal of the Franklin Institute, 1833, on a rumbling beast that would have been seen as the great technological achievement it was: a 12,000-lb land carriage connector between London and Birmingham. The report¹ was made by the great Thomas Telford, engineer and builder of roads/bridges/canals as president of the Society of Civil Engineers, and a host of others, on the possibility of Sir Charles Dance’s steam carriage being capable of implementing a transport service using existing roads.

[Sir Charles Dance’s vehicle, ca. 1833. Source: wikipedia entry for Sir Charles Dance, motorist.]

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Technology, History of
The Nazis, Seudetenland, and Budweis (1938)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

This pamphlet¹ by Karl Janovsky seems to be a very thorough and heavy piece of German-interest propaganda regarding the Seudetenland, and seems to have been printed prior to the “annexation”. The tragic front cover bears a label for the meeting of the NSDAP Council in Budweis, Czechoslovakia, for June 4, 1939. Unfortunately we see the famous 16th century Black Tower desecrated by two large Nazi banners. The tower survived; the Nazis didn’t. (Also–Budweiser, the U.S. beer, was originally supposed to be a knockoff of the famous bier brewed here since the 14th century–after a while, Budweiser USA “changed directions” in the taste of their beer, but kept the marketing and brand, which is enormously valuable.) And so one of the statistical maps, showing a chart of imports from Germany into Czechoslovakia:

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Anticipation, History of — World War II
Meeting the Pretercomputer and the Pseudo-Computer (1956 and 1963)

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2767

In just a few minutes of browsing in a pile by the desk last night I came across three terrific titles of papers, two of which used terminology I had never encountered before. The papers were on “pretercomputers” and “pseudocomputers”, with a third using familiar terms in a very unfamiliar pairing, “uneconomical robots”. Finding all three from two slender sources within that time frame was a real eyebrow-raiser.

The first work was found in a loose issue of the Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery (April 1956, vol 2/no. 3, pp 65-73): Robert Perkins’ “EASIAC¹, a Pseudo-Computer”. It seems that the EASIAC (EASy Instruction Automatic Computer) was developed to make it easier for a newbie to program a computer, or at least easier to program compared to the MIDAC ( Michigan Digital Automatic Computer) with which it was associated. (The MIDAC was developed by the Willow Run Research Center of the Engineering Research Institute, U Michigan, the first digital automatic computer in the Midwest.)

Next in the pile was a 1963 issue of Cybernetica², and the first title in that issue leapt from the page: C.K. Gordon, Jr.’s “In defense of the Search for the Pretercomputer”. Gordon seems to be looking for foundations of some next level of computer (“preter”=”praeter”, Latin for “beyond”, or past what is normal), writing on machine thinking, and “awareness”, and an approach to expression of thought by a computer in a “preter-linguistic response”(?). I rushed to the conclusion of the paper where the author states that ”much mathematical groundwork has been laid in logically demonstrating the constructibility of certain types of automata” citing work by Burkes, Culbertson, Kleene, Minsky, McCulloch/Pitts, Turing, Uttley, von Neumann, and others. He also points out the “construction of a number of rudimentary devices, showing their learning behavior and a remarkable degree of adaptability” by Ashby, Chapman, Miner, Pask, Shannon, Uttley and Walter.

Checking out the bibliography for this paper I found this delightful-sounding title of what I think is a semi-famous work by James T. Culbertson, “Some Uneconomical Robots”. The paper was published in Shannon and McCarthy’s Princeton Studies series Automata Studies, which unlike the other two papers mentioned in this post was at least one that I had seen before, a noteworthy effort in a volume of noteworthy efforts. (Culbertson also wrote a paper called “Hypothetical Robots” in 1952, plus The Minds of Robots (1963, U of Illinois), in which he makes a philosophical case for there being some at least low-level consciousness in everything, and therefore the same is true for machines.) I’ve determined that I don’t have this volume of the Princeton series, nor can I find it (yet) online, and although there are some strong references to the paper I haven’t yet found much to tell me of its contents, though I did find Herbert Keller (in his “Finite Automata, Pattern Recognition and Perceptrons” in the JACM in 1960) describe it as arithmetic and “fanciful”. ³ I realize I’ve said nothing yet about the Culbertson, but my time allowed on this post–like the robo-cops tracking down Robert Duvall’s character in THX-1138–has run out. I’ll return to this post and extend it shortly.

Readers of my post this morning may be thinking these papers are far less extraordinary-sounding than I found them to be, especially finding them in such rapid succession. I don’t do all that much work in the history of computers, so to a more-general history of science person like myself these titles were captivating, burnished with a deep golden hue of possible whimsical and sci-fi interpretations…the possibilities there are endless. It was a funny little adventure that was populated with many extensions and absorbing titles that begged to be pulled out-of-context. They seemed on one hand to be the stuff of speculative history of the future material–except of course they were far more “real” than that.

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On the Great Beauty and Importance of Graph Paper (1874)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2766

It is difficult sometimes to be appreciative of the smaller things when we are so used to the bigger ones–like in the writing life life, complaining of occasional slow bits in connectivity that will allow you to

In the old days if it used to be necessary to go to the library, use reference tools, locate the journal, locate the article, put in a request to see the volume, wait for the deliveries, and then perhaps one of them will actually be what you’re looking for–and this is just the first step after you’ve done the initial reading and research, the digging through footnotes and etc. for what led or inspired people in their thinking had just begun. Then there’s the driving to the library, and finding a spot of park (in my case that was for the LC and parking was no easy matter), and then came the distraction of the greasy spoon on PA Ave and the drive home, all of which could take part or most of the day. That was all fine, because in my case, one of the world’s greatest libraries was a half-hour away–much less depending upon traffic. In the older days, well, if you weren’t in a large city you would not have had access to what you needed, which meant correspondence to acquire the materials and so on, turning the process I experienced in a day into weeks, or longer. IT all gets more complicated the further back you go, and once you get to the point preceding a general postal system, stuff gets hard. Also, someone like I would be out pulling potatoes out of the ground instead of researching who-cares-about-THAT stuff in the library.

I try to remember that when I complain that my connectivity is slower than it usually is.

All of this came to mind seeing these paragraphs (literally and figuratively!) by the one of my favorite figures of the 19th century, the polymathic W. Stanley Jevons¹ (1835-1882), who wrote on how to use graph paper.

The creation of graph paper came decades after the creation of the bar graph (William Playfair in 1786), monuments in the history of the visual display of information. It was a great and very highly useful creation–or creations, I should say, for the idea of the graph and for the paper. Jevons did not invent graph paper, though he may be the first to write about it as a tool. He give credit to an earlier writer for using graph paper for the first time: J. Perkins’ “On the Progressive Compression of Water by High Degrees of Force, with Some Trials of Its Effects on Other Fluids” in the Philosophical Transactions for 1826, (p 544, see below for one of the images from the paper).

Source: William Stanley Jevons, The Principles of Science, a Treatise on Logic and Scientific Method, 1874, the chapter “Graphical Methods”. See: https://archive.org/details/theprinciplesof00jevoiala/page/492

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Information, Quantitative Display of
An Uncommon “First” in the History of Data Visualization and Cartography (1874)
JF Ptak Science Books Post 2765

So this is a loose-and-pulled-thread post–I bumped into something that led me somewhere coming face-to-face with an interesting reference to an unusual “first” in the history of cartography. I found the map and (correct) reference and tracked it down to the great Comptes Rendus. The map is the first one to use contours to convey statistical information. It was a short article and I was very curious to see the illustration of the map–I discovered that the paper written on an significant innovation on the display of information did not display the information. No image! This is one of those scarce article describing a breakthrough in the visual representation of data that doesn’t use an illustration of the pioneering work. After I figured it out that the description of the map was for the breakthrough map in question and satisfied with my read and translation of it, I went ahead and wrote a description for its sale on my blog bookstore. I was about to upload it but stopped to check out the mass database for booksellers called Addall dot com and found somebody had a loose issue of the document offered for sale at eight bucks! That was a disappointing end to an hour+ of research. The person selling the paper for $8 did not know what the article was all about, I reckon, since I thought it was slightly valuable…still, it was a damp blanket to shoulder on a wet and stormy night. Lastly, I should note that I haven’t yet found the original source for the map’s image that I was able to display here–I’ll hopefully do that in due course.

The paper was by the lyrically-named Louis Leger Vauthier (1815-1901) and titled “Note sur une carte statistique figurant la rapartition de la population de Paris” (found in the Comptes Rendus des Seaances de L’Academie des Sciences, 1874, vol 78, pp 264-267). It is evidently the “first statistical use of a contour map” according to https://infovis.info/ In a more expanded and restrictive description from Wikipedia, we see that Vauthier “…is credited with one of the earliest (if not the first) thematic map to use contour lines to display a non-geographic variable on map— a contour map of the population of Paris in 1874”. This is probably the more accurate and definitely more qualified description.

In any event the map as I said is described, but not pictured, which is pretty unusual to my experience. I did find a picture of the map here: James R. Beniger and Dorothy L. Robyn, “Quantitative Graphics in Statistics: A Brief History”, in The American Statistician, vol. 32, no. 1, pp. 1–11, 1978

And: https://www.sci.utah.edu/~kpotter/Library/Papers/beniger:1978:QGSH/index.html

The Vauthier article starts out with a simple statement about the map adopting the use of the terrain relief and using it to show the distribution of the population of Paris, using terms and descriptions that were already established and “quite familiar”:
- “Cette carte a pour objet de figurer, au moyen du procédé graphique généralement adopté aujourd’hui pour représenter le relief du terrain, la manière dont la population de Paris est répartie. En topographie, le relief s’acccuse par des courbes de niveau, s’échelonnant à diverses hauteurs au-dessus ou au-dessous du plan de comparaison adopté. Les plans, ou, plus généralement, les surfaces de niveau contenant ces courbes sont, d’habitude, pour la facilité de l’interprétation, conçus équidistanis, et l’on complète la description en inscrivant sur chaque combe la distance au plan de comparaison.”
- “La carte de la popidation procède de notions tout à fait analogues. Les courbes sinueuses qui y sont tracées passent chacune par des points ou la population est la même: ce sont, quant à la population, de véritables courbes de niveau. Elles sont équidistantes, en ce sens qu’elles s’échelonnent par degrés égaux de variations de la population ; quant aux nombres inscrits sur chaque courbe, ils représentent le nombre d’habitants à l’hectare. Ces brèves indications nous paraissent suffisantes pour que toute personne habituée à la lecture des cartes topographiques lise la nôtre sans difficulté. 11 nous reste à expliquer ce qu’est la surlace que nous avons représentée, quelle est sa génération et comment, en dehors des courbes de niveau qui y sont tracées, elle doit être conçue dans l’espace.”
The article continues in depth in the description of the data and how it was collected.
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Information, Quantitative Display of — Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking
Invading England with 50,000 Planes (1908)
JF Ptak Science Books Post 2764

Some of the most striking things in my collection/store/accumulation are the hundreds of images that portray data for display purposes–even more so, those that use a vernacular setting to put some anthropomorphic breath into a statistic.

The print that we’re looking at here appeared in the 19 December 1908 issue of The Illustrated London News and is entitled “The Futility of Herr Rudolf Martin’s¹ Plan of Invasion by Aeroplane”, and reports on a possible German invasion scenario of Great Britain that was delivered in Berlin on 2 October 1908. This fantastic piece of artwork by Hermanus Willem Koekkoek (1867-1929) graphically depicts what the author maintained was the impossibility of a German force to invade England by landing 50,000 flying machines and 100,000 men on the Kentish coast of England–undoable because “of the impossibility of finding landing-room (for the planes) and cover for an army on aeroplanes. The artist depicts a small town and what I guesstimate to be 60 planes in the air and 75 or so on the ground, leaving it to the imagination of the reader where the other 49,875 might go. He DOES make a point, and very vividly.

“Nothing could show better the futility of Government Councillor Rudolf Martin’s idea that Germany could construct 50,000 flying machines for 50-million pounds…and land 100,000 men on the Kentish coast from Calais within half an hour.” I would imagine that this illustration drove the point home to the folks who didn’t actually bother to read anything about the Martin defense plan. (It was in a similar way that Thomas Nast was able to control public opinion and sway political refuge and protection away from Boss Tweed. Tweed famously boasted that he didn’t care what the newspapers said about him because his power base didn’t read–he might’ve been and probably was correct here, so Nast took after Tweed via the political cartoon, and big too, and frequently; and the cartoons, even if the people looking at them couldn’t read, told the whole story graphically, and it was this that brought an end to Tweed more than anything else.)

In 1908 Martin gave an interview to the Daily Mail in which he outlined another plan by which he felt Germany could launch 3,500 “specially design” airships (I’m guessing dirigibles) and land 350,000 (!) men in England in a half-hour. This evidently whipped itself into a frothy aeroplanitis in 1909, despite such efforts as this graphical reasoning by the ILN to dispense with the unreasonable fears.

The airplane flown by the Wrights (the first powered heavier-than-air flight) occurred barely six years prior to these frantic events. Their invention was still fresh (and basically “foreign”, as the Brits lagged well behind the other major powers in flight until WWI) and understandable in a way that the fears were not understandable, not really, because of the newness and exotic aspect of the possibly-threatening invention. Also it should be noted that the first heavier-than-air airplane crossing of the Channel didn’t take place until the next year, by Louis Bleriot, who claimed a 1000-pound prize for being the first to do so. The first passenger wasn’t taken across until 1910, and the first airship didn’t make a flight across until 1915. So no doubt Martin was looking into a far off future, except that the planes were still mostly of Wright design.
- For a tour of the chronological history of the graphical representation of quantitative data as well as innovations in statistical and representational cartography, please have a look at Michael Friendly’s fantastic work at York University https://datavis.ca/milestones/index.php?group=1900%2B–it is an historical site the way it should be done, complete with all the trimmings, as well as the usually-absent but very important citations to the original articles used in the chronology.
Notes:

1. I don’t know much about Mr. Martin at all except that in Richard P. Hallion’s Taking Flight, Inventing the Aerial Age, from Antiquity to the First…. (pg 298) we find Martin being mentioned among other “popular authors” as Verne, Wells, Kipling, and Fawcett as being somewhat responsible for forming the perception of future flight. Martin was also the president of the German Airship League and author of The Coming War in the Air.
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Aviation & flight — Information, Quantitative Display of — World War I