Author: JF Ptak

Cancer and the Psychology of Buying Stuff

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2713

When John Watson began his radio talk on NBC on January 12, 1932, on “How to Grow a Personality”, he meant it…literally and figuratively. Watson (1878-1958) is considered to be one of the founders of psychological school of behaviorism, which stated simply is the theory that all of human and animal behavior is derived or implied or controlled by “conditioning” or the stuff that happens to/in-and-around the being, and that emotions and thinking (such as they are) have little or nothing to do with forming the response to a stimulus. He claimed that he could train 12 infants to become 12 different sorts of people–lawyer, doctor, engineer, thief, etc.–if given access to training the infants/children–he never got too terribly close to doing that, though he did with a human experiment with the infamous case of “Little Albert”, which is a sodden story of questionable ethics.

In the case of personality, Watson defines it so: “Your personality at any age is just a cross-section of the things you can do at that age. There is nothing mysterious about it–it is just a steady growth coming out of your past.” And evidently that means that you can grow your personality by growing the things that you can do, thus training yourself by the stuff you can get done. Sounds a little circuitous and has a strong scent of a napping carny in a big sweaty revival tent, but it did pass great psychological barriers, as Watson is held in very high regard in the history of 20th century American psychology.

This is no doubt a rude and crude assessment, but so it goes.

One thing is without doubt–he did figure out how to create a “demand” for something. After he was fired from his post at Johns Hopkins (for having an affair that resulted in an enormously popularized divorce trial) Watson took himself and his intellectual toolkit and began work at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. He put his two decades of experimental research to hard use, and “discovered” that he could make something desirable by making it familiar and memorable, selling more a positive memory of (or surrounding) a particular thing more so than teh need or use for the thing itself. One example of the use of his behavioral talents was in selling cigarettes. Billions of them. In keeping with his idea, he created a tremendously repeated slogan for a cigarette, and found that he could basically sell the thing wrapped in its memory/slogan layers. The product was Camel ciggies, and the slogan was “I’d walk a mile for a Camel”. The slogan could’ve been for Cigarette X, or a rope, or a hammer, or sugar, or whatever–the object didn’t matter; only the environment and landscape created for it did.

So there’s that.

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Anticipation, History of — Psychology
Weekly People, 1942–definitely Not “People Magazine”

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I have developed a sort-of collection in the History of Blank and Empty Things series of not-filled-in applications and diaries and questionnaires and such, from Hitler Jugend diaries to notebooks for Nazi Warsaw telephone directories to applications for membership in the Women’s KKK, and so on. This small installment comes on the back inside cover of Labor Conscription, What Does it Mean…Involuntary Servitude!, a hopeful ad for the reader who might be interested in Socialism and receive the magazine People Weekly, as this far Left pamphlet was after all published by the New York Labor News Company on behalf of the Socialist Labor Party U.S.A. This of course in no way bears any resemblance to the modern People Magazine, the fruits and labor of that periodical being sweets and fats.

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Books–Great Cover Art — Social History
Measuring Things with the Hindenburg (1936)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

There have been a number of posts to this blog on “Measuring Stuff With Unexpected Things” (a collection that never became its own category and which is basically folded into the “Display of Information” series) where there are graphic displays of objects being unexpectedly measured with known but unusual units of measure. The Eiffel Tower seems to be a favorite (seeing a stacked column of them showing how deep the Atlantic Ocean is, for example); there is also occasional use of the Great Pyramid, the Woolworth Building, the Titanic (up to a certain point), the Hoover Dam, rows of the Great Pyramid filled with Dirt (!), and so on. It is actually a useful tool, even though I’m having a bit of fun with the idea right now–people might not be able to comprehend how much xxx-tons of dirt is that was excavated from the Panama Canal, but if you put it in terms of filling the Great Pyramid and having a row of them going from one end of Manhattan to the other, then there is some sense made of a big number.

Tonight’s example is much simpler than most of the other entries, as we’re simply measuring the new ship Queen Mary against the Hindenburg had newly burst onto the fame stage, and became an instant well-known entity, a manufactured mountain in the sky, an impressive sight to everyone–and so when it is compared to the Queen Mary and found to be smaller, everyone knew instantly how big the ship must be–making this mode of comparison a useful tool.

The Hindenburg had been first launched just months before it appeared in this piece in the August 1936 issue of Popular Mechanics; it would famously crash just seven months later.

The other reason I decided to share this image is that it is simply a wonderful design, something that would look fantastic enlarged to 4’x8′.

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Information, Quantitative Display of
Unusual Maps Department: (1) Map of Brunetness and (2) Heights of the British Isles (1897)

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I must say that I’ve never seen a map of “Relative Brunetness” before finding this one, today. It occurs in a little bit of a wincing article by William Ripley (Ph.D., and assistant prof of sociology at (surprisingly) M.I.T) called “The Racial Geography of Europe”, and appearing in Appleton’s Popular Science Monthly for December 1897. Here we see the “Index of Nigrescence”, which I take is a measure of blackness of the hair (in this case), with light to dark meaning, well, light-to-dark measures of hair, this taken from 13,000 observations. A few pages away comes a map of the stature of adult males in the British Isles, locating the averages between the gross average of 5’6.5″ to 5’10” and over.

I don’t have anything to say about the maps, but I thought that it was worth reproducing them.

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Information, Quantitative Display of — Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — Maps/Diagrams of Imagination & Ideas
Missing the Fog for the Mist–Where was Fog in Renaissance Painting?

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2713

If there is one thing that you can say about Renaissance art is that it was determined to represent nature–in form, color, perspective–as truthfully as possible. Except–so far as I can tell–in some cases, like, say, fog. And mist. I’m not sure why this is so, but once I started looking for examples of major and then minor cases showing fog in painting in the 1400-1550 period…and then later. Much later. Fog–and mist–seem to pop up regularly in the mid-19th century, along with the new genre of Impressionism, which seems to be when people became more more comfortable with nothingness and the suggestion of things that may or may not be present or in existence.

There are examples of suggested forms in the Renaissance where the outlines of forms come to life without their detail, as with the great Paolo Uccello (and the solids in the horses in the Battle of San Romano, ca. 1450s), but for the most part, where detail was supposed to be, there was detail.

Leaving elements of an artwork open to interpretation was not a problem with other cultures at this time, as in China and Japan, where fog and mist and rain and obscurity were very comfortable elements in artwork, and for centuries earlier than the Western Renaissance. The classic rendering say of a swath of fog obscuring everything but the top of a mountain was a “comfortable” mode of expression that can be seen in a number of landscapes that are listed as national treasures of Japan. For example, the “evening Bell from Mist-Shrouded Temple” and one of the Eight Views of Xiaoxiang is attributed to to Muqi Fachang (or Muxi Fachang) and was painted in the mid-13th century.

Another interesting example of countless others (and which like the Muqi Fachang is counted as a Japanese National Treasure) is that by Sesshū Tōy, in a landscape with broken ink/splashed ink (“hatsubokun, evolving an abstract simplification of forms and freedom of brushwork”–Wiki), and created ca. 1495. The dreamy landscape and the sparse and (somewhat aggressive) brushwork of the “broken ink” seem more a creation of Zen and meditation than anything else.

Like the rarity of the full-toothed, open-lipped smile, the image of fog and mist and the difficulty in representing what it is that they are mostly-hiding seems to be a not-at-all popular genre in Western art for hundreds of years. This is of course all conjecture on my part and is based mostly upon a little research and a lot of what is probably faulty memory, but it does at least seem to be an observation worth a little thought. After all, clouds had their many champions for long periods of time, though they served mostly to frame and accentuate the subject of the painting rather than being subjects in themselves (or at least so until the 18th century). Fog couldn’t even exist in the West as a major part of paintings even as clouds-on-the-ground until the 19th century, when painting was catching up to work done by the Chinese and Japanese in the 13th century.

I suspect I’ve gotten a lot wrong in this speculation, and I’d like to hear about it as a form of conversation.

Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_National_Treasures_of_Japan_(paintings)

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Art History — History of Nothing
Interesting Manuscript Outline of the Japanese Air Force, 1944

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“Jap Air Force” is a short outline on the structure of the air force of the Japanese Imperial Army, written as classroom notes (ca. 1944) by a naval student of the Naval Air Combat Information School at Quonset Point, Rhode Island. It is a section of a larger notebook from the class of February 1944, with nearly all of the offset pages from type originals are marked as “restricted”. The diagram that leads the three pages of notes is 3″x8″ in the original, and is a bit remarkable for how much information it contains and organizes in such a small area. I reproduce the text below:

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Aviation & flight — Militaria
Rare and Formerly “Restricted” Info Packet on German Aircraft, 1944

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“Performances of German Aircraft” (16 February 1944) is one of several dozen pieces that were loose-leaf bound by a naval student of the Naval Air Combat Information School at Quonset Point, Rhode Island. The entire notebook is interesting as a whole from a pedagogical point of view, and teh components are usually very engaging (and even noteworthy) on their own. The nine pages that comprise this Luftwaffe section of the classwork (identified as “RESTRICTED” in the offset typed original) are an outline for the classwork and no doubt augmented during lectures–but as they stand it is s statement of the base knowledge for what was being taught to intelligence officers.

This section is 9pp, complete, and I reproduce it below (each page is greatly expandable and easy to read):

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Aviation & flight — Technology, History of
On Forming a National Database of “Mental defectives” (1931)
JF Ptak Science Books Post 2702 (with additions)
Here’s a title that should stop you:

[Source: Neil Dayton, “The Necessity for Central Registration of Mental Defectives”, published as an offprint by the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, NYC, 1931, and printed by the William Boyd Printing Company, Albany, NY. ]

Of course, it was 1931, and the Eugenicists were running free and easy, the stiff wind of their convictions running freely through their imaginary hair…and what would we all do with this gathering of information on mental defectives¹ once that was done? And what was the definition of mental defective, anyway? thirdly of course–what do we do with the mental defectives once this energy of definition and collection had been done? well, a new group would come to power in two years’ time from the publication of this article, and in their own right they did these things and then decided to kill many of the people that they cataloged. That’s one example. I’m not saying that the well-meaning people like the author of this paper would be anywhere near this horrible, not at all; I just don’t know why they would want to gather this information. There wasn’t a discussion of collection of treatment of these people, just their registration in one large database. Every time I see in this pamphlet the statement on the need for such a registry, I expect to see why–but that never comes, only the repetition of a phrase like “that a central registry for mental defectives is desirable, and that it should be organized and operated by an established state department” and its variations.

Finally, at the end of the short 14-page pamphlet, in the final paragraph, something appears close to explaining the “why” issue–but it winds up being a little tautological, stating that the need for gathering the names of all mental defectives is “to make available authorized agencies and individuals definite information on known mental defectives”

Basically–at least so far as this pamphlet explains–the reason for gathering all of these names into a system of state-wide databases is to have the names in state-wide databases.

Notes:

1. “Mental defective” seems to make its first appearance in English in 1899, according to the Oxford English Dictionary:
Designating a person suffering from an illness or impairment of the mind. Esp. in mental case,mental defective. A use now increasingly avoided.

1899   Appletons’ Pop. Sci. Monthly Apr. 747 (title)    Mental defectives and social welfare.

1904   Lancet 17 Sept. 838/1   The Home Secretary..has at last been impressed with the total inadequacy of the provision made for..mental incapables.

1908   Lancet 12 Sept. 813/2   Dr. W. C. S. Clapham..had many suspected mental cases sent to his out-patient department.

By 1960 it was seen in the U.K. that “the most important change in terminology made by the new Act [sc. the Mental Health Act, 1959] is that the expressions ‘mental deficiency’ and ‘mental defectives’ should be abolished… ‘Mental disorder’ is introduced as a new term covering all forms of mental ill health.”–Oxford English Dictionary (“Mental”)
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Social History
The Unions and Tear Gas Propaganda
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The “sublime mundane” probably isn’t the correct category for this pamphlet, though I think it comes close. The illustrations and the text are squint-inducing, both unusual in peculiar ways, and all for the purpose of selling tear gas.

The Red Line of Crime and…Civil Disorder is the pamphlet, and it was published in Pittsburgh and printed by Federal Laboratories in 1934. It makes the case for tear gas over bullets in response to civil disobedience/riots/unrest, a good part of that being described sotto voce (and not so much so) as the work of unions. In any event, tear gas is prescribed as the reactive agent to the reaction, being more humane and less fatal…anyway, that is the sales pitch.

I’m sharing the pamphlet here mainly for its illustrations and design. Here’s the very arresting front cover:
- A description of Federal Laboratories from Wiki: “In the 1930s, custom gas guns by FedLabs were adopted by the New York Prison department, following a sales pitch made before the APA by the president of FedLabs in Baltimore in 1931. Also in the 1930s, Federal Laboratories actively worked to sell gas guns for the purpose of strikebreaking, with one FedLabs representative firing a tear gas grenade during the 1934 West Coast waterfront strike, resulting in the death of a striker due to skull fracture. Auerbach notes, however, that despite FedLabs stated opposition to “communist” strikers, the firm continued to sell tear gas to the Soviet Union even during 1933.”
And the center illustration, a montage of newspaper clippings:

And in this image, a worker’s strike is described as “an open revolt against orderly society…under the influence of such leadership they might go to any ends”, which is as great a propaganda statement against unions as I have seen:
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Propaganda — Social History
The 50 Million Volt Dust Curtain of Nikola Tesla (1934)

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2709

The “dust” in question here is not intended to be weaponized versions of those famous dancing bits of Brown and Einstein, but a very very high voltage-invisible-something that would obliterate any attacking air force or army. The idea is one in a long history of “death rays”, though this one belonged to Nikola Tesla (who had a much earlier outline for an idea on militarizing wireless telegraphy technology) and as such was received with considerable respect in the public and scientific spheres—or, at least in scientific areas, the low/no detail plan was given inspection and testing before it was dismissed.

The popular press (Chicago Tribune, New York Times, Newsweek) reported that Tesla had plans for a country-wide defensive network that would basically make the U.S. Impregnable and put an end to war. One problem was that there were nearly no details offered for the plan—at least until this article (“Invisible Dust Curtain to Halt War Planes”) appeared in Popular Mechanics in November 1934. Even though this as an extended version of the idea, there’s scant detail in this article as well. But, Tesla being Tesla, the idea was given wide circulation.

Simply put, the article reports that Tesla “discovered force rays which can be projected like long curtains and through which planes cannot penetrate” which was composed of “microscopically-fine” “possibly dust of some sort”bits “driven electrically” at “velocities” of 50,000,000 volts and which would form invisible walls that were miles high and surrounded the country. And so thus powered the weapon could destroy an army of one million and an attacking air force of 10,000. Somehow all of this would permanently disable aircraft engines as well as destroy soldiers.

Evidently the plan for this invention was based upon four other inventions which hadn’t yet been invented, which would explain the lack of details. Nevertheless, the National Bureau of Standards did investigate and attempt to reproduce something resembling the results that Tesla was trying to bring about, but obviously failed, even though Popular Mechanics had reported some successes in experimentation.

It seems to me that Tesla’s technology was far more powerful and advanced than many of its fictional rivals like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, and maybe even so of the Martian weapons from Wells’ The War of the Worlds.

Notes:

For an interesting read in this area I was surprised to what looks like a thorough and engaging work by William J. Fanning, Jr.: Death Rays and the Popular Media, 1876–1939: A Study of Directed Energy Weapons in Fact, Fiction, and Film (McFarland, 2015) page 95

Also, it is a curious thing that when I googled “tesla” the first reference to Nikolai was at the bottom of the 9th page, nearly 100th in line after the car/company–and that is just all sorts of wrong.

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Future, History of the — History of the Future — Technology, History of

Author: JF Ptak

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2702 (with additions)